FARES,  PLEASE! 


HALFORD   E.LUCCOCK 


GIFT   OF 
MICHAEL  REE,SE 


FARES,  PLEASE! 

AND  OTHER  ESSAYS  ON 
PRACTICAL    THEMES 


BY 

HALFORD  E.  LUCCOCK 


THE  ABINGDON  PRESS 

NEW  YORK  CINCINNATI 


Copyright,  1916,  by 
HALFORD  E.  LUCCX)CK 


^- 


CONTENTS 

CBAVTBB  rAoa 

Foreword 5 

I.    Fares,  Please! 7 

n.    Masters  of  Arts 12 

III.  Are  You  a  Person  of  Distinction?  19 

IV.  Doorkeepers 23 

V.    Is  God  on  Your  Visiting  List  ?  . . .  28 

VI.    Thinking  in  a  Circle 32 

VII.    The  Giant  Thriller 37 

VIII.    On  the  Line  of  Discovery 43 

IX.    Getting  into  Society 48 

X.    The  Sunny  Side  of  Ten 54 

XL    A  BiNET  Test  for  Defectives 59 

XIL    What's  the  News  ? 65 

XIII.  Three  Chairs 70 

XIV.  How  Much  Are  You  Worth  ? 75 

XV.    The  Surprise  jOf  Life 80 

XVI.    Safety  First  ? 85 

XVII.    What  Do  You  Expect  Your  Church 

to  Do  for  You? 90 

3 


CHAFTEB 

XVIII. 

XIX. 
XX. 

XXI. 

XXII. 

XXIII. 

XXIV. 

XXV. 

XXVI. 

XXVII. 

XXVIII. 

XXIX. 

XXX. 
XXXI. 

XXXII. 

XXXIII. 

XXXIV. 
XXXV. 

XXXVI. 

XXXVII. 

XXXVIII. 


CONTENTS 

PAQS 

What  Does  Your  Church  Ex- 
pect OF  You? 95 

The  Highest  Heredity 99 

Carried  Over  from  Childhood 

— Liabilities 104 

"The  Will" 110 

"  Dutch  Courage  " 115 

High-Handed  Tyranny 120 

A  Hair-Trigger  Constitution.  126 

The  Latest  Thing 131 

Over  the  Wall 137 

Clouding  the  Issue 143 

The  Fallacy  of  Preparation..  149 
The    Creative    Influences    of 

THE  Church 154 

Which  Kingdom  ? 160 

"A   Maxim   Silencer    for   Old 

Wheezes  " 165 

Pilgrim's  Progress — ^Revised  . .   170 

Washing  the  Air 175 

"At  Your  Peril  ! " 180 

Everything  Upside  Down 184 

Getting  All  Run  Down 188 

"  Splendid  Failures  " 193 

Swan  Songs 199 


FOREWORD 

It  is  a  happy  book  whose  chapters  live  and 
work  together  as  a  family  of  blood  relatives. 

This  little  volume  cannot  aspire  to  such 
felicity.  Its  covers  open  on  an  orphan  asylum 
rather  than  a  family.  Like  the  inmates  of  an 
Orphans'  Home,  its  chapters  are  many  and 
are  all  small;  they  are  dressed  in  but  the 
plainest  workaday  gingham  and  calico;  they 
are  all  waifs — picked  up  on  widely  scattered 
lanes  of  observation. 

Yet  for  a'  that,  they  are  not  entirely  unre- 
lated. They  are  on  speaking  terms  with  one 
another,  and  try,  at  least,  to  speak  a  common 
language  of  faith  and  hope.  They  all  believe 
that  life  is  an  affair  of  great  zest  and  great 
prizes,  and  they  share  together  the  conviction 
of  Arthur  Hugh  Clough  that  "Life  loves  no 
lookers  on  at  his  great  game." 

The  essays  are  offered  simply  in  the  hope 
that  they  may  prove  suggestive  starting  points 
for  thought. 

Halford  E.  Luccock. 

New  Haven,  Connecticut. 


Digitized  by  tine  Internet  Archive 

in  2007  witin  funding  from 

IVIicrosoft  Corporation 


http://www.arcliive.org/details/farespleaseotlierOOIuccricli 


FARES,  PLEASE! 

The  smile  on  the  face  of  the  conductor  of 
the  7:29  to  the  city  every  morning  is  a  real 
event  in  the  daily  life  of  scores  of  commuters. 
His  genial  "Good  morning"  goes  to  make  up 
for  the  lack  of  sunshine  on  cloudy  days.  Yet 
all  the  passengers  know  that  behind  the 
warmth  of  the  smile  and  the  unfeigned  cor- 
diality of  the  greeting  is  the  stern  insistence 
of  "Fares,  please,  gentlemen!"  For  the  7:29 
every  day  is  not  a  charity  outing;  it  is  a  pay- 
as-you-go  enterprise. 

The  world  greets  its  children  with  a  smile 
and  a  sunny  "Good  morning,"  and  some  are  so 
entranced  with  the  smile  and  the  "bloom  o'  the 
world"  that  they  fail  to  notice  with  any  clear- 
ness the  iron  demand,  "Fares,  please!"  A 
recent  astronomer  has  waxed  enthusiastic  over 
the  glorious  free  ride  nature  gives  us  in  the 
swing  of  the  planet,  hurtling  through  billions 
of  miles  of  azure  sky  and  tinted  cloud  at  the 
rate  of  so  many  miles  a  minute.  He  calls  it  the 

7 


xg^^:}f/:t:     FAfeSS,  PLEASE! 

grandest  roller  coaster  in  the  universe.  He  is 
right  when  he  calls  it  glorious.  He  is  wrong 
when  he  calls  it  free. 

To  some  people  the  art  of  life  largely  con- 
sists in  evading  the  fare.  Paul's  noble  thought, 
"I  am  debtor,"  is  still  Greek  to  them.  H.  G. 
Wells  says  truly  that  people  can  go  through 
life  "fudging  and  evading  and  side-stepping, 
till  their  first  contact  with  elemental  realities 
is  the  cold  sweat  of  their  deathbed." 

Some  Steal  a  Ride.  They  evade  the  fare  by 
"riding  the  bumpers."  They  go  through  life  as 
"blind  baggage."  The  world  has  made  an  in- 
vestment in  them  to  the  extent  of  thousands  of 
dollars  for  sustenance.  The  State  has  in- 
vested thousands  more,  to  say  nothing  of  life 
and  blood,  in  their  education.  For  this  they 
make  no  return  in  benefits  conferred.  On  the 
lowest  rung  of  the  social  ladder  they  are  called 
tramps.  Higher  up  they  are  often  called 
clever. 

Some  Ride  on  a  Pass.  This  pass  is  handed 
to  them  by  others,  usually  ancestors,  in  the 
shape  of  money,  position,  or  talent.  Some  one 
else  pays  their  way,  and  they  accept  it  com- 
placently as  the  proper  thing.  No  sense  of 
debt  goes  with  it.     Fortunately,  such  a  free 


FARES,  PLEASE!  9 

trip  in  a  Pullman  is  no  longer  regarded  as  so 
praiseworthy  an  achievement  as  it  once  was. 
The  inheritance  tax,  the  income  tax,  the  cor- 
poration tax,  each  is  a  loud  stentorian,  "Fares, 
please !" 

Some  Ride  on  a  Child's  Ticket.  They  pay 
half  fare.  To  the  world's  demand  for  a  strong 
man's  stint  of  work  and  service  they  plead- 
ingly insist  that  they  are  only  twelve  years 
old  and  must  be  let  off  with  giving  to  the 
world  a  half  portion  as  their  share.  They  do 
not  ask  to  be  carried  to  the  skies  on  flowery 
beds  of  ease;  all  they  ask  is  to  be  allowed  to 
go  in  a  perambulator. 

Some  Pay,  These  are  the  ones  who  make 
the  world  morally  solvent.  They  take  no 
delight  in  dodging.  Their  lives  are  lifted  out 
of  triviality  and  insignificance  by  the  enno- 
bling power  of  a  great  obligation.  They  do 
not  attempt  to  discharge  their  debt  by  merely 
becoming  effective  economic  producers,  for  the 
world  is  more  than  a  granary,  a  machine  shop, 
a  storehouse  of  commodities.  It  is  a  moral 
enterprise,  the  scene  of  the  kingdom  of  God,  a 
progressive  advance  in  spiritual  welfare.  Its 
capital  and  stock  in  trade  is  not  reckoned  in 
pig  iron  and  corn,  but  in  moral  purposes  and 


10  FARES,  PLEASE! 

spiritual  ideals.  For  these  they  are  debtor  in 
honor  bound  to  add  to  the  world's  spiritual 
resources. 

How  do  the  debits  and  credits  lie  with  us? 
There  is  in  a  Middle  Western  city  a  keen  busi- 
ness man  of  high  probity,  one  of  the  largest 
factors  in  its  commercial  life.  He  does  not 
realize  that  the  qualities  that  have  won  him 
success,  the  aggressive  will,  the  alert  mind, 
even  his  honesty,  are  the  unearned  increment 
and  free  gift  of  six  generations  of  God-fearing 
New  England  ancestry.  He  prattles  in  a  half- 
witted manner  about  being  a  self-made  man. 
For  the  church  and  the  welfare  movements  of 
his  city  he  has  no  time.  In  plain  language,  he 
is  stealing  a  ride  through  life  without  paying 
his  fare.  Here  is  another  man  in  whose  life 
the  Sunday  school  has  played  an  immeasur- 
able part.  It  helped  to  shape  an  impressionable 
boy  into  a  responsible  and  upright  man.  In 
that  institution  he  now  takes  only  the  most 
nominal  interest.  He  cheerfully  leaves  the 
real  work  to  be  done  by  others  whose  youth 
and  inexperience  are  only  partly  made  up  for 
by  their  zeal  and  devotion.  He  is  trying  to 
ride  on  a  half -fare  ticket.  What  shall  we  say 
of  the  multitude  who  owe  the  peace  and  purity 


FAKES,  PLEASE.  11 

of  their  homes,  the  whole  core  of  their  life's 
happiness  and  security,  to  the  gospel  and  the 
church,  and  who  think  to  cancel  the  obligation 
by  a  few  patronizing  words? 

What  an  irresistible  force  the  church  would 
have  did  it  not  have  to  carry  so  many  who 
merely  ride  and  do  nothing  else!  We  hear 
much  good  advice  about  keeping  out  of  debt. 
Saint  Paul  has  something  better  to  offer.  Get 
in  debt !  Give  your  life  the  impetus  of  a  reali- 
zation of  that  love  so  amazing,  so  divine  that 
the  whole  realm  of  nature  could  never  repay  it. 
Only  such  an  acknowledged  obligation  can 
redeem  our  lives  from  tawdriness  and  selfish- 
ness. "I  beseech  you,  brethren,  by  the  mercies 
of  God."  "I  am  debtor  to  the  Greeks  and  to 
the  Gentiles." 


II 

MASTEES  OF  ARTS 

Helen  Keller  has  in  her  autobiography  a 
quaint  observation  regarding  her  college  ex- 
aminations at  Radcliffe,  which  will  find  an 
echo  in  every  student's  heart.  "It  is  remark- 
able," she  says,  "the  number  of  things  one 
knows  which  are  not  in  the  examination 
paper."  We  have  all  sat  in  the  hot  schoolroom 
in  June,  biting  the  ends  of  our  pens  and  star- 
ing blankly  into  space,  wondering  by  what 
black,  diabolic  art  the  teacher,  instead  of  ask- 
ing for  any  of  the  thousand  and  one  things  we 
knew  perfectly,  managed  to  pick  out  the  small 
dozen  which  by  some  chance  we  were  not  able 
at  the  moment  to  recall.  Nor  does  the  wonder 
by  any  means  end  with  our  formal  school  days. 
The  examination  paper  with  .which  we  are 
confronted  in  the  larger  school  of  experience 
has  the  same  way  of  skipping  the  things  we  are 
best  prepared  on.  Our  passing  grade  depends 
on  the  mastery  of  arts  which  the  textbooks 
hardly  ever  mentioned.     We  learn  three  or 

12 


MASTERS  OF  ARTS  13 

four  languages,  and  have  them  at  command, 
only  to  find  out  that  the  chief  examination  is 
on  holding  our  tongue.  We  master  three 
sciences,  and  then  discover  that  the  world  lays 
nearly  all  its  stress  on  the  science  of  keeping 
our  temper  and  getting  along  with  people, 
which  was  never  expounded  to  us  out  of  the 
book.  With  our  heads  full  of  history  we  are 
examined  on  prophecy,  the  ability  to  foretell 
the  probabilities  of  to-morrow  and  act  with 
wisdom  accordingly. 

To  win  the  degree  of  Master  of  the  Arts  of 
Life  is  a  far  more  considerable  undertaking 
than  to  become  a  Master  of  Science.  Bulk  of 
information  might  fill  the  latter  requirement, 
but  a  mastery  of  the  finest  of  fine  arts — that 
of  living — ^is  never  to  be  achieved  in  some 
study  "far  from  the  madding  crowd's  ignoble 
strife,"  but  in  our  contacts  with  people  in  the 
friction  of  the  street  and  market  place.  The 
real  demands  of  life  which  we  must  meet 
resemble  with  far  more  closeness  the  difficult 
achievements  of  a  circus  performer  than  they 
do  the  studious  pursuits  of  a  library. 

1.  Standing  on  Your  Head,  Can  you  stand 
on  your  head?  This  is  a  strange  question,  but 
we  find  as  we  go  along  with  the  years  that  it 


14  FARES,  PLEASE! 

counts  about  fifty  per  cent  in  the  sum  total  of 
accomplishment.  When  young  Disraeli  was 
making  his  first  campaign  for  Parliament  a 
voice  in  the  audience  called  out,  "We  know 
what  the  Whig  candidate  is  standing  on,  and 
what  the  Tory  candidate  is  standing  on,  but 
what  are  you  standing  on?"  "I'm  standing 
on  my  head,''  was  his  ready  reply.  In  the 
eddies  and  cross-currents  of  modern  life  a 
clear  head  is  the  only  secure  standing  ground. 
What  distinguishes  a  lawyer  of  the  first  rank 
from  the  average  one  is  the  ability  to  dis- 
entangle from  all  the  facts  the  essential  point 
on  which  the  case  will  turn,  and  carry  it  on 
that  point.  It  was  said  of  Rufus  Choate  that 
he  had  an  "instinct  for  the  artery."  In  like 
manner  we  need  to  be  able  to  distinguish  those 
courses  which  are  thoroughfares  to  a  goal 
worth  reaching  from  those  inviting  paths 
which  are  only  blind  alleys.  We  stand  on  our 
head  when  we  are  not  swung  about  by  the 
gusts  of  passion,  but  can  think  things  through 
to  their  final  and  logical  outcome.  The  effect 
of  city  life  has  been  well  described  as  "a 
deliberate  rush  at  every  one  of  the  five  senses." 
It  is  a  rush  at  the  mind  as  well.  Specious  and 
plausible  views  of  life  demand  our  suffrage 


MASTERS  OF  ARTS  15 

under  the  terms  of  what  Emerson  said  was 
Margaret  Fuller's  slogan — "I  don't  know 
where  I'm  going — Follow  me!"  Paul  num- 
bered this  among  the  indispensable  arts.  "In 
mind  be  men."  "Be  no  more  children,  tossed 
to  and  fro,  carried  about  with  every  wind  of 
doctrine."  Jesus  continually  threw  men  back 
on  themselves  by  his  question,  "How  does  it 
seem  to  you?"  It  is  a  worthy  ambition  for  a 
person  to  want  to  stand  on  his  own  feet.  But 
that  is  only  part  of  the  battle.  The  larger 
half  is  to  "stand  on  his  own  head." 

2.  Walking  the  Tight  Rope.  A  rare  degree 
of  physical  skill  is  required  in  a  man  to  keep 
himself  moving  along  one  small  wire,  holding 
his  balance  against  the  forces  that  would  pull 
him  to  one  side  or  the  other.  But  the  question 
whether  we  can  walk  the  tight  rope,  hold  our- 
selves in  concentration  along  one  line  against 
distracting  forces,  is  a  cardinal  one  in  life's 
test.  Saint  Paul  mastered  it — "This  one  thing 
I  do."  Thomas  A.  Edison  did  it,  working  for 
almost  two  years,  sometimes  sixteen  hours  a 
day,  to  make  the  first  phonograph  record  the 
sound  "sh."  It  is  a  large  part  of  every  notable 
career.  Noah  Webster  worked  thirty-six  years 
on  his  Dictionary;  Bancroft,  twenty-six  years 


16  PARES,  PLEASE! 

on  his  History  of  the  United  States;  Gibbon 
twenty  years  on  The  Decline  and  Fall  of  the 
Roman  Empire;  Michael  Angelo  took  seven 
years  to  paint  the  Sistine  Ohapel  ceDing; 
Titian  worked  seven  years  on  the  Last  Supper, 
and  Da  Vinci  four  years  on  the  head  of  Mona 
Lisa. 

And  what  shall  we  say  of  Victor  Hugo,  who, 
when  he  was  writing  Notre  Dame,  sent  all  his 
clothing  out  of  the  house  lest  he  be  tempted 
to  go  out?  or  Thackeray,  whose  Vanity  Fair 
was  refused  ten  times?  or,  rising  to  a  higher 
realm,  of  Robert  Morrison  and  Henry  Martyn, 
who  worked  heart-breaking  years  in  China  and 
India  without  a  single  convert?  The  measure 
of  a  man's  soul  is  his  ability  to  disregard  the 
hindrances  and  concentrate  his  energy  on  the 
achievement;  to  put  aside  the  accidents  of  a 
relation,  a  work,  or  opportunity  and  grasp  the 
reality  and  hold  to  it. 

3.  Building  the  Human  Pyramid,  This  is 
a  fine  thing  to  see  in  a  gymnasium  or  on  the 
playgrounds.  A  number  of  men  are  standing 
in  a  haphazard  group.  Suddenly  the  whistle 
blows  and  each  man  falls  into  his  place  in 
adjustment  with  the  others,  and  in  a  few  sec- 
onds the  unorganized  mass  becomes  a  sym- 


MASTERS  OP  ARTS  17 

metrical  living  pyramid.  But  it  is  a  much 
finer  thing  to  see  in  the  lives  of  people  built 
into  the  achievement  of  some  common  good. 
It  is  a  truth  that  we  fully  learn  only  by  ex- 
perience, that  our  net  contribution  to  the 
world's  good  depends  rather  less  on  our  indi- 
vidual endowment  of  genius  or  talent  than  on 
our  ability  to  get  along  with  folks,  to  hold  our 
individual  preferments  in  subordination  to  the 
larger  purpose,  and  to  endure  even  the  harsh 
asperities  of  others  for  the  sake  of  some  shin- 
ing goal  to  be  reached  only  through  coopera- 
tion. It  is  easy  enough  to  go  along  forcing 
others  to  adjust  themselves  to  our  moods, 
absolving  ourselves  by  the  reflection,  "I  am  a 
plain,  blunt  man."  When  told  that  he  must 
sit  next  a  certain  bishop  at  a  dinner  party, 
Henry  Luttrell  said,  "I  do  not  mix  well  with 
the  Dean,  but  I  should  positively  effervesce 
with  the  bishop."  It  is  much  easier  to  ^^effer- 
vesce" with  uncongenial  persons  than  to 
adjust  ourselves  to  them  in  cooperative  service. 
Lincoln  never  better  illustrated  that  fine  art  of 
subordination  of  self  by  which  he  towered  to 
greatness  than  in  his  saying,  "I  would  hold 
McClellan's  horse  if  it  would  bring  us  a  vic- 
tory."   For  the  sake  of  national  unity,  Von 


18  FARES,  PLEASE! 

Moltke,  a  naturally  impulsive  man,  "could 
hold  his  tongue  in  seven  languages."  It  was 
the  fine  art  of  Jesus,  who  for  the  joy  that  was 
set  before  him,  endured  the  cross,  despising  the 
shame. 

Verily,  art  is  long.  Our  hope  would  be 
small  without  the  resources  of  the  Head  Mas- 
ter. We  are  not  dependent  on  the  teaching  of 
formal  precept,  but  ours  is  that  same  divine 
curriculum  of  companionship  through  which 
the  impulsive  Peter  was  graduated  to  a  mag- 
nificent stability  and  the  narrow  and  bigoted 
Paul  became  a  living  epistle  of  love. 


Ill 

ARE  YOU  A  PERSON  OF  DISTINCTION? 

Are  you  listed  in  Who's  Who?  No?  Then 
you  can  hardly  be  a  person  of  distinction,  for 
the  advertisement  claims  it  to  be  a  biograph- 
ical dictionary  of  the  "distinguished  persons" 
in  the  United  States. 

We  do  not  like  the  invidious  classification. 
It  is  artificial.  Yet  it  is  widely  used  by  college 
authorities  as  a  sort  of  rough  index  of  success. 
To  be  listed  in  Who's  Who  in  America  is  con- 
crete evidence  that  you  have  "arrived."  On 
the  basis  of  this  book,  to  go  to  college  is  to 
increase  your  chances  of  "arriving"  by  one 
thousand  per  cent. 

It  has  a  certain  real  value  in  stating  in 
graphic  terms  the  advantage  education  gives 
for  achievement  in  life.  Yet  when  one  con- 
siders what  real  distinction  in  life  must  be, 
how  outward  and  mechanical  such  a  basis  is ! 
Carlyle  rightly  protests  that  we  pay  too  much 
attention  to  a  person's  outward  trappings.  We 
bow   profoundly   and    say,    "Good   morning, 

19 


20  FARES,  PLEASE! 


Clothes,"  "Good  morning,  Medals,"  when  what 
we  ought  to  recognize  and  honor  is  the  thing 
beneath  and  say,  "Good  morning,  Soul." 

The  rank  is  but  the  guinea  stamp, 
The  man's  the  gowd  for  a*  that. 

A  man  coming  out  from  a  banquet  recently 
said  to  a  companion,  "Do  you  know  that  there 
was  represented  at  that  banquet  wealth  to  the 
amount  of  about  thirty  million  dollars?" 
"Yes,"  was  the  ready  answer,  "and  conversa- 
tion to  the  amount  of  about  thirty  cents."  The 
distinction  was  all  on  the  outside. 

What  are  the  final  and  valid  marks  of  a 
person  of  real  distinction?  Laying  aside  such 
things  as  certificates  of  deposit,  membership 
in  clubs,  college  degrees,  and  dress  suits — be- 
cause, like  the  celebrated  "flowers  that  bloom 
in  the  spring,"  they  have  nothing  to  do  with 
the  case — what  remains?  Can  we  find  a  more 
ready  and  serviceable  gauge  than  the  one 
Henry  van  Dyke  has  given : 

Four  things  a  man  must  learn  to  do 
If  he  would  keep  his  record  true: 
To  think  without  confusion  clearly. 
To  love  his  fellow  men  sincerely. 
To  act  from  honest  motives  purely, 
And  trust  in  God  and  heaven  securely. 


A  PERSON  OF  DISTINCTION?      21 

1.  ^^To  think  without  confusion  clearly,'^ 
Surely,  this  would  make  one  distinguished  in 
any  company.  Most  men  bolt  their  opinions 
as  they  do  their  food.  Their  ideas  are  as  much 
prepared  and  predigested  as  their  breakfast 
food.  The  newspaper,  the  popular  catchword, 
the  shopworn  proverb — these  become  so 
readily  our  substitutes  for  mental  self-direc- 
tion. President  Wilson  said  recently,  "As 
never  before,  we  are  living  in  a  confused 
world."  Moral  issues  are  clouded.  The  person 
who  thinks  at  second-  or  third-hand  gets  easily 
lost.  To  have  a  clear  personal  grasp  of  the 
principles  of  Jesus,  to  know  their  meaning  in 
terms  of  the  day's  work  and  problems,  to  be 
able  to  separate  the  kernel  from  the  husk  of 
truth — here  is  distinction! 

2.  ^^To  love  your  fellow  man  sincerely/' 
There  are  four  ways  of  loving  our  fellow  men. 
Three  of  them  are  very  easy.  One  is  the  hazy 
way,  very  popular.  It  gives  a  certain  emo- 
tional satisfaction  to  cherish  a  vague  and  airy 
sentimentalism  about  men.  It  prompts  to  no 
action.  It  lays  no  cross  on  one's  life.  It  does 
not  deal  in  concrete  people ;  it  prates  airily  of 
^^humanity.''  Another  is  the  interested  way, 
to  love  those  whom  it  pays  to  cultivate.    An- 


22  FARES,  PLEASE! 

other  is  to  spend  the  whole  of  one's  affection 
within  the  charmed  circle  of  kindred  and  con- 
genial spirits.  Christian  love  is  not  any  of 
these.  It  comes  from  a  belief  in  men's  worth ; 
is  built  on  their  needs.  The  "interesting"  man 
to  Jesus  was  the  man  in  need,  not,  as  is  so 
often  the  case  with  us,  the  talented,  the  clever, 
the  congenial.  To  love  sincerely  is  to  find  all 
need  interesting. 

3.  ''To  act  from  honest  motives  purely/' 
That  means  to  be  convinced  that  God  cares 
most  of  all  for  the  quality  of  the  inner  life; 
to  know,  as  Maltbie  Babcock  put  it,  "To  be 
faithless  is  to  fail,  whatever  the  apparent  suc- 
cess of  earth ;  to  be  faithful  is  to  succeed,  what- 
ever the  apparent  failure  of  earth." 

4.  "To  trust  in  God  and  heaven  securely  J' 
"If  you  believe  in  God,"  wrote  Robert  Louis 
Stevenson,  "where  is  there  any  room  for 
terror?  If  you  are  sure  that  God,  in  the  long 
run,  means  kindness  to  you,  you  should  be 
happy." 

There  is  only  one  Who's  Who  in  America 
that  signifies.    It  is  the  Lamb's  Book  of  Life. 


IV 
DOORKEEPERS 

"The  church  needs  a  few  ushers,  but  we 
can't  all  ^ush' ;  there  is  room  for  about  a  dozen 
deacons,  but  we  can't  all  of  us  ^deac'  What 
shall  the  rest  of  us  do?" 

So  ran  the  perplexed  query  of  a  layman  dur- 
ing the  Men  and  Religion  Movement. 

Why  not  be  doorkeepers? 

We  think  of  the  confession  of  David,  "I  had 
rather  be  a  doorkeeper  in  the  house  of  the 
Lord  than  to  dwell  in  the  tents  of  wickedness," 
as  a  beautiful  statement  of  the  truth  that 
even  the  lowest  place  in  the  service  of  God 
ranks  higher  than  any  station  outside  of  it. 
But  when  we  think  of  what  the  function  of 
the  doors  of  the  church  really  is,  in  the  largest 
sense,  the  office  of  doorkeeper,  instead  of  being 
a  minor  and  incidental  one,  looms  large. 

The  final  problem  of  a  church  is  not  one  of 
finances  or  even  of  audiences.  It  has  to  do 
with  doors.  It  is  the  problem  of  keeping  its 
doors  swinging  inward,  so  that  it  may  receive 
and  grow;  and  swinging  outward,  so  that  it 
may  give  forth  in  ministry. 

23 


24  FARES,  PLEASE! 

Some  church  doors  do  not  swing  at  all. 
Their  motto  is  "Statu  Quo."  New  faces  in  the 
pew,  new  names  on  the  roll,  new  tasks  laid 
upon  the  heart — these  come  only  like  the  rare 
visits  of  Halley's  comet.  They  frequently 
speak  of  holding  their  own,  sweetly  oblivious 
of  the  fact  that  in  the  realm  of  living  things 
there  is  not  to  be  found  such  a  preposterous 
anomaly  as  anything  merely  holding  its  own. 

Some  church  doors  swing  only  inward. 
They  do  not  truly  represent  One  who  came  not 
to  be  ministered  unto  but  to  minister.  They 
are  centripetal  forces  in  a  community — draw- 
ing to  themselves.  They  are  rarely  ever  con- 
sciously selfish,  but  lack  vision.  Very  insidi- 
ously the  achievement  of  a  church's  maintain- 
ing itself  in  health  becomes  an  end  in  itself. 

The  doors  of  a  church  must  be  kept  open 
so  that  the  wind,  the  breath,  the  Spirit  of  God 
may  fill  it.  Frequently  we  enter  a  church 
building  which  has  been  closed  for  a  week  and 
sense  the  mustiness  and  heaviness  of  the  air. 
What  a  tonic  it  is  to  fling  wide  the  door  so 
that  a  fresh  breeze  may  vitalize  the  atmos- 
phere !  Now,  in  the  conduct  of  worship  there 
abideth  these  three — art,  music,  and  air;  but 
the  greatest  of  these  is  air.    A  minister  paused 


DOORKEEPERS  25 

in  a  service  once,  saying,  "We  will  now  con- 
tinue the  worship  of  God  by  opening  the  win- 
dows." He  was  not  irreverent.  In  that  case 
it  was  the  indispensable  condition  of  worship. 
Chrysostom  himself  is  no  match  for  carbon 
dioxide. 

The  same  truth  lights  our  way  as  we  go  on 
in  our  thought  from  the  church  as  a  building 
to  the  church  as  a  fellowship  of  believers.  The 
people  who  cannot  be  spared  are  those  whose 
spirit,  prayers,  and  eager  sympathies  are  door- 
ways through  which  that  breath  of  God  which 
swept  over  the  hearts  of  men  at  Pentecost  and 
touched  them  into  life  may  find  access  to  men. 
Such  people  create  a  spiritual  climate,  free 
from  the  nipping  frost  of  cant  and  warm  with 
sincerity,  in  which  it  is  as  normal  and  natural 
for  a  soul  to  open  out  to  God  as  it  is  for  a 
valley  to  blossom  under  the  breath  of  June. 
It  is  a  very  easy  thing  for  a  minister  to  say 
from  the  pulpit,  "The  doors  of  the  church  are 
now  open."  Whether  it  is  true  or  not  is  quite 
another  thing.  That  depends  on  the  door- 
keepers. 

It  is  a  work  of  eternal  vigilance  to  keep  the 
doors  of  the  church  open  to  the  sounds  of  the 
world's  need  and  pain.    The  president  of  the 


26  FARES,  PLEASE! 

'N'ew  York  Society  for  the  Prevention  of  Un- 
necessary Noise  has  had  constructed  in  her 
residence  on  Riverside  Drive  a  sound-proof 
room.  Below  in  the  streets  is  the  ceaseless  jar 
of  the  world's  life.  Still  below  that  is  the 
shriek  and  rumble  of  the  railroad  trafl&c  on  the 
water  level.  But  into  that  sound-proof  room 
no  wrangling  note  of  turmoil  ever  penetrates. 
It  is  a  sobering  thought  that  the  church  may 
easily  become  such  a  sound-proof  room,  admit- 
ting into  its  confines  of  quietness  and  content 
no  disturbing  reminders  of  the  world's  aching 
heart  and  sin.  "Peace,  Perfect  Peace,"  may 
be  its  only  anthem,  so  that  it  forgets  to  turn 
over  the  page  to  the  less  sedative  strains  of 
"Rescue  the  Perishing."  God  never  speaks  so 
directly  to  his  church  as  through  the  deep- 
throated  voice  of  the  world's  misery,  and  every 
member  who  by  his  sympathies  enables  the 
church  to  continually  hear  the  "still,  sad 
music  of  humanity,"  lays  upon  its  heart  the 
restless  urge  which  the  fellowship  of  his 
sufferings  brings. 

Open  my  heart  to  music;  let 

Me  thrill  with  spring's  first  lutes  and  drums; 
But  never  let  me  dare  forget 

The  bitter  ballads  of  the  slums. 


DOORKEEPERS  27 

A  doorkeeper  lets  the  doors  of  the  church 
swing  outward,  so  that  lives  which  have  felt 
the  impression  of  the  Master's  Spirit  may  go 
out  to  expression  in  his  service.  After  the  first 
sermon  at  Capernaum  Jesus  "went  from  the 
synagogue  into  the  house" — there  to  carry  the 
truth  he  had  himself  spoken,  through  the  heal- 
ing hand  on  the  fevered  brow.  Through  doors 
that  swing  outward  the  church  emerges  to 
sacrificial  activity,  "the  creed  of  creeds,  the 
ministry  of  loving  deeds." 


IS  GOD  ON  YOUR  VISITING  LIST? 

A  RECENT  novelist  has  eloquently  described 
the  religion  of  one  of  his  characters  in  the 
sentence,  "She  had  God  on  her  visiting  list." 

Nothing  could  be  added  by  enlarging  on  the 
theme  for  a  whole  chapter.  It  aptly  describes, 
not  only  that  particular  woman,  but  also 
the  widespread  formal,  polite  conventionality 
which  so  often  masquerades  as  religion.  It 
reminds  us  of  the  statement  in  the  obituary 
notice  of  an  English  squire:  "He  was  not  in- 
terested in  religion,  but  in  all  other  respects 
he  was  a  consistent  Protestant," 

A  great  many  people  have  God  on  their 
visiting  list.  Their  relation  to  their  Creator 
is  polite  and  respectful.  It  adheres  to  the  lines 
of  good  form.  It  is  sustained  with  about  the 
same  warmth  and  from  something  of  the  same 
motives  that  one  keeps  in  touch  with  a  rich 
uncle  from  whom  he  has  distant  expectations. 
It  is  this  attitude  which  gave  rise  to  the 
observation  that  many  people  took  their  Chris- 
tianity like  vaccination  for  smallpox,  taking 

28 


IS  GOD  ON  YOUR  VISITING  LIST?  29 

just  enough  to  prevent  them  from  catching  the 
disease. 

The  social  forms  by  which  many  people  pay 
their  religious  duty  are  varied. 

1.  The  Occasional  Call,  It  is  bad  form  to 
neglect  one's  calling  list.  Smith  aims  to  call 
on  Jones  every  so  often ;  he  does  not  want  to  let 
Cousin  George,  who  is  a  little  sensitive,  and 
to  whom  it  pays  to  show  attention,  feel  that 
he  is  forgotten.  So  he  calls  there.  Likewise 
he  goes  to  church  on  Easter  and  Christmas, 
perhaps  also  on  Children's  Day.  Or  he  goes 
with  the  lodge  to  the  Memorial  Service  and 
lives  in  a  glow  of  righteous  exaltation  for  six 
months.  In  a  very  different  sense  from  the 
prophet  Elijah,  "In  the  strength  of  that  meat 
he  goes  forty  days." 

2.  The  Week-End  Visit.  This  is  popular  as 
a  religious  as  well  as  a  social  institution.  The 
rest  of  the  week  need  not  take  its  cue  too 
slavishly  from  Sunday.  The  week-end  visit  at 
church  concludes;  "To-morrow  to  new  fields 
and  pastures  new."  As  the  somewhat  terrible 
cynicism  of  Bliss  Carman's  poem,  "Grass,"  puts 
it: 

They're  praising  God  on  Sunday, 
They'll  be  all  right  on  Monday, 
It's  just  a  little  habit  they've  acquired. 


30  FARES,  PLEASE! 

A  couple  came  to  a  Chicago  minister  to  be 
married.  The  groom  asked  if  it  would  be 
proper  for  them  to  kneel  down  and  pray,  and 
on  being  told  that  it  would  be  very  fitting, 
inquired  how  long  they  should  pray.  "O,  that 
is  for  you  to  judge,"  said  the  minister,  "just 
a  short  prayer."  Then  the  groom  had  a  sud- 
den inspiration.  "I'll  kneel  down  and  count 
twelve,"  he  said.  We  smile,  and  yet  that  is  a 
very  common  idea  of  prayer — kneeling  down 
and  counting  twelve,  or  pronouncing  other 
words  equally  meaningful ;  just  going  through 
the  motions.  It  bears  the  same  relation  to  real 
worship  that  slipping  your  calling  card  under 
the  door  bears  to  communion  with  a  friend. 

3.  The  Annual  Visit.  This  has  its  vogue. 
It  frequently  comes  in  Lent.  It  is  a  regular 
affair,  just  as  the  children  go  out  to  Aunt 
Mary's  for  two  weeks  every  summer.  It  is  a 
good  thing,  for  frequently  such  a  concentra- 
tion of  religious  thought  and  practice  is  a  tide 
which  taken  at  the  flood  leads  on  to  spiritual 
fortune.  The  trouble  is  that  so  often  after 
the  flood  recedes  the  beach  is  left  totally  high 
and  dry.  After  Easter  we  take  the  decorations 
down.  We  stack  up  the  gilded  lettering,  "He 
is  Risen,"  away  behind  the  coal  bin  in  the 


IS  GOD  ON  YOUR  VISITING  LIST?  31 

church  cellar,  to  be  used  next  year  perhaps.  A 
sad  symbol  of  the  treatment  accorded  the 
Easter  truth.  The  living  truth,  "He  is  risen,'' 
is  frequently  dismantled  and  tucked  away  in 
an  unused  corner  of  the  mind. 

4.  The  Sick  Call  This  call  is  all  that  God 
ever  receives  from  some.  Too  busy  in  health, 
he  is  on  their  visiting  list  only  in  affliction. 
Then  "they  call  upon  the  Lord  in  their 
trouble."  What  a  ghastly  relation  to  him 
whose  mercies  are  new  every  morning  and  who 
would  daily  bear  our  burden ! 

Jesus  said,  "Abide  in  me."  He  did  not  say, 
"Visit  me  occasionally."  We  abide  when  we 
do  all  things  as  unto  him,  squared  with  his 
purpose,  directed  by  his  Spirit.  When  we 
abide  we  rejoice.  "If  ye  abide,  ...  ye  shall 
ask  .  .  .  and  it  shall  be  done."  When  we 
abide  we  bear  fruit.  "He  that  abideth  in  me, 
the  same  beareth  much  fruit." 


VI 

THINKING  IN  A  CIRCLE 

Dr.  Richard  C.  Cabot^  in  that  amazingly 
suggestive  book,  What  Men  Live  By,  describes 
with  a  fine  insight  a  common  mental  process 
which  easily  tends  to  become  a  fixed  habit 
nnless  it  is  checked.  He  calls  it  "thinking  in 
a  circle''  and  gives  a  very  convincing  diagram 
and  illustration  which  holds  the  mirror  up  to 
our  own  nature.  Here  is  the  way  the  merry- 
go-round  in  a  man's  mind  frequently  runs: 
"(1)  I  must  find  some  work;  (2)  Am  I  fit  for 
any?  (3)  How  lonely  it  is  to  be  one  of  the 
unfit!  (4)  This  loneliness  is  killing  me.  (5) 
I  can't  stand  it,  so  ( 1 )  I  must  find  some  work," 
etc.  Thus  the  mind  runs  around  the  dizzy 
circle. 

"Vacillation,"  he  says,  "has  the  same  circu- 
lar character  or  pendulous  swing."  Here  is 
the  inside  working  of  another  piece  of  mental 
machinery:  "(1)  I  guess  I'll  buy  some  stock 

32 


THINKING  IN  A  CIRCLE  33 

at  once,  but  (2)  the  price  may  fall.  (3)  I 
guess  it's  safer  not  to  buy  now.  (4)  But 
there  is  a  splendid  chance  to  get  rich  if  I 
buy  now,  so  (1)  I  guess  I'll  buy  some  stock," 
etc. 

"Break  away!  Think  straight  in  some 
direction !"  This  advice,  we  all  recognize,  is  a 
big  improvement  on  endless  swinging  around 
the  circle.  But  how  to  do  it — there  lies  the 
rub !  General  Robert  E.  Lee  had  often  to  face 
the  problem  in  the  concrete  form  in  which  it 
comes  to  all  of  us.  After  long  hours  of  work- 
ing on  the  details  of  some  piece  of  military 
strategy,  he  would  often  seek  out  Longstreet 
and  say :  "I  need  a  tangent.  My  mind  has  got 
to  working  in  a  circle."  In  the  counsel  of  that 
alert  and  friendly  mind  he  found  the  tangent 
that  led  him  straight  to  some  decision. 

A  wise  friend  may  often  serve  as  a  needed 
tangent.  "Iron  sharpeneth  iron;  so  a  man 
sharpeneth  the  countenance  of  his  friend." 
But  there  is  a  Friend  who  sticketh  closer  than 
a  brother,  with  whom  the  ultimate  solution  of 
the  problem  lies. 

Worry  does  its  greatest  damage  through  the 
vicious  character  of  its  circular  swing.  It 
accomplishes  nothing  but  the  breaking  down 


34  FARES,  PLEASE! 

of  the  brain  cells  and  the  dimming  of  the 
native  hue  of  resolution  of  the  spirit.  "It's 
not  the  jumping  hurdles  that  hurts  the  horses' 
feet,"  said  a  wise  stable  groom.  "It's  the 
hammer,  hammer,  hammer  on  the  hard  high- 
ways." Many  a  mind  which  has  met  great 
issues  and  crises  bravely  and  serenely  is 
broken  down  by  a  succession  of  ignoble  cares. 
The  anxious  foreboding  within  the  closed 
circle  of  the  same  thorny  problem  speedily 
robs  us  of  the  mood  of  victory. 

Jesus  gave  himself  unreservedly  to  meeting 
this  aspect  of  men's  lives.  To  replace  a  vitiat- 
ing worry  by  a  confident  trust  he  ever  reck- 
oned among  first  things.  In  his  revelation  of 
the  good  purposes  of  the  Father,  and  the 
Father's  knowledge  and  love  of  his  children, 
he  gave  men  a  tangent  which  led  them  out  to 
freedom  and  peace.  When  one  is  lost  in  the 
woods  and  is  traveling  in  a  circle  the  best 
thing  to  do  is  to  climb  a  tree  and  get  one's 
bearings  and  so  bring  to  a  confused  mind  the 
steadying  power  of  a  long  perspective.  That 
is  just  what  filial  trust  does  as  we  catch  its 
contagion  from  Jesus.  It  does  not  dislodge 
all  difficulties  or  solve  all  perplexities.  These 
remain.     But  trust  gives  a  new  might  with 


THINKING  IN  A  CIRCLE  35 

which  to  deal  with  them,  a  readiness  to  do  our 
best  and  leave  the  issue  with  him.  To  know 
that  God's 

greatness  flows  around  our  incompleteness. 
Round  our  restlessness,  his  rest, 

is  to  emerge  from  circles  into  the  saving  health 
of  straight  lines. 

Temptation  waxes  strong  in  circles.  It  is 
the  repeated  insistence  of  an  image  returning 
to  the  mind  which  finally  carries  away  resist- 
ance like  the  undermining  of  a  dyke  by  a 
spring  freshet.  The  mind  returns  to  the  allur- 
ing temptation  as  the  bird  circles  around  the 
serpent.  As  we  look  at  the  life  of  the  Master 
we  see  how  again  and  again  the  same  tempta- 
tions that  assailed  him  in  the  wilderness  recur. 
Yet  he  did  not  lose  his  way.  He  always  found 
the  will  of  his  Father  the  straight  line  which 
led  him  unerringly  to  the  mark  of  his  high 
calling.  With  every  temptation  there  is  a  way 
of  escape.  Joseph  found  it.  "How  can  I  do 
this  great  wickedness  and  sin  against  God?" 
Peter  found  it.  "We  must  obey  God  rather 
than  man." 

Edward  Rowland  Sill  gives  us  a  clue  toward 
changing  little  circles  into  noble  highways ; 


36  FARES,  PLEASE! 

Forenoon  and  afternoon  and  night,  forenoon 
And  afternoon  and  night,  forenoon  and — what? 
The  empty  song  repeats  itself — no  more? 
Yes,  this  is  life.    Make  this  forenoon  sublime, 
This  afternoon  a  psalm,  this  night  a  prayer. 
And  time  is  conquered  and  thy  crown  is  won. 


VII 

THE  GIANT  THRILLER 

"Mother,"  said  a  little  boy,  as  he  stepped 
off  the  roller  coaster  at  Coney  Island,  between 
gasps  as  his  jumping  heart  settled  back  from 
his  throat  to  its  normal  place,  "I'd  like  to  live 
on  a  Giant  Thriller."  He  looked  back  long- 
ingly at  the  great  serpentine  curves  over 
which  he  had  just  traveled  with  such  tingling 
sensations  to  heart  and  head. 

No  doubt  we  have  all  at  times  shared  his 
wish.  And  a  great  many  children  of  a  larger 
growth  continue  to  cherish  the  desire  in  one 
form  or  another,  long  after  they  have  ceased 
to  give  it  such  frank  expression. 

Life  to  a  large  number  of  people  is  just  that 
— a  Giant  Thriller.  It  holds  just  so  much 
"permanent  possibility  of  sensation."  Its 
final  end  is  not  so  much  the  destination  it 
reaches  as  the  number  and  degree  of  thrills, 
excitement,  and  pleasure  which  the  ups  and 
downs  of  the  journey  may  be  made  to  yield. 
It  is  a  sort  of  colossal  amusement  resort  in 

37 


38  FARES,  PLEASE! 

which  the  modern  Shylock  whets  the  edge  of 
his  appetite  and  demands,  not  his  pound  of 
flesh,  but  his  hour  of  stimulated  thrill.  Some 
one  said  of  Whistler  that  he  always  lived  up 
to  his  emotional  income.  To  be  really  able 
to  do  that  in  a  crude  way,  to  fill  one's  days 
with  the  greatest  number  and  variety  of  elec- 
tric shocks  and  have  its  dull  and  quiet  hours 
figure  as  the  occasional  period  amid  a  long 
and  bright  succession  of  exclamation  points — 
this  is  the  chief  end  of  man  according  to  the 
(very  much)  Shorter  Catechism  of  the  multi- 
tude. 

This  modern  quest  of  a  thrill,  unlike  the 
spirit  of  intelligent  adventure  in  "the  spacious 
days  of  the  great  Elizabeth,"  is  not  a  noble 
one.  Its  cheap  and  tawdry  scene  is  for  a  large 
part  the  saloon,  the  theater,  the  dance  hall, 
the  erotic  novel,  the  moving  pictures.  He 
would  be  blind  who  failed  to  see  the  real  social 
service  and  possibilities  of  moving  pictures. 
He  would  be  blind  too  who  failed  to  see  in 
many  of  them  the  unwholesome  refuge  of 
vacant  and  rapidly  disintegrating  minds.  Its 
cheap  terrors,  crude  substitutes  for  humor  and 
vulgarization  of  love  are  forces  yet  to  be  reck- 
oned with.    Life  as  a  roller  coaster  of  pleasur- 


THE  GIANT  THRILLER  39 

able  thrills,  refine  the  character  of  the  thrills 
as  one  may,  is  still  a  poor  thing.  It  makes  thin 
souls,  flabby,  irresponsible,  and  stupid. 

The  Merry -Go-Round  is  another  of  the  peo- 
ple's playthings  which  represent  a  real  and 
common  attitude  to  life.  It  is  not  charac- 
terized by  the  ardent  chase  of  pleasure.  It  is 
the  unthinking  and  limp  acceptance  of  a  little 
track  of  routine  and  convention  which  sends 
one  day  around  the  same  circle  as  another. 
Each  day  has  the  same  thoughts,  as  the  barrel 
organ  has  the  same  tunes.  This  circle  is  by 
no  means  a  depraved  one.  A  great  many  thor- 
oughly upright  and  likable  people  act  on  the 
assumption  of  life  being  a  more  or  less  aimless 
spinning  around  the  same  groove  in  which 
their  part  is  to  get  as  comfortably  fixed  and 
pass  the  time  as  pleasantly  as  possible.  But 
this  assumption  carries  a  great  liability — dis- 
appointment. This  complaint  was  voiced  not 
long  ago  very  exactly :  "I've  spent  all  my  life 
making  money  to  get  food  to  eat  and  clothes 
to  wear.  The  food  doesn't  agree  with  me  and 
the  clothes  don't  fit.  I  guess  I  must  be  a 
failure."  He  certainly  was!  One  may  come 
to  the  end  of  the  most  placid  and  unruffled 
existence  conceivable,  but  if  his  life  has  never 


40  FARES,  PLEASE! 

been  stirred  by  noble  aspirations,  he  may  cast 
his  final  ballot  with  Macbeth : 

It  is  a  tale 
Told  by  an  idiot,  full  of  sound  and  fury. 
Signifying  nothing. 

It  seems  strange  that  any  one  in  his  right 
senses  should  wish  to  ride  on  the  ^^hump  the 
humps/'  It  is  a  long  slide  broken  here  and 
there  by  round  protrusions,  against  which  one 
is  violently  thrown*  if  he  does  not  steer  clear 
of  them.  No  doubt  it  is  the  balked  disposition 
of  fear  which  finds  gratification  and  makes 
the  ride  popular. 

Is  it  too  much  of  an  extravagance  to  say 
that  the  aim  of  life  to  some  is  to  avoid  as 
many  of  its  risks  of  misfortune  and  trouble  as 
possible?  This  world,  it  seems,  is  a  vale  of 
tears;  trouble  comes  to  all.  Hence  the  art 
of  life  consists  in  skillfully  missing  as  many 
of  its  bumps  as  you  may.  This  conceives  of 
happiness  in  the  wholly  negative  terms  of 
escape.  And,  of  course,  it  misses  it  com- 
pletely, for  happiness  is  never  negative;  it  is 
always  positive.  It  is  never  the  mere  avoid- 
ance of  evil ;  it  is  always  the  presence  of  active 
good.    What  shall  it  profit  a  man  if  he  escapes 


THE  GIANT  THRILLER  41 

every  conceivable  misfortune,  if  at  the  same 
time  he  misses  everything  else.  Peabody  says 
finely  of  Jesus,  "Joy  and  sorrow  were  never 
ends  to  be  gained  or  avoided ;  they  become  the 
mere  rhythm  of  his  step  as  he  moves  steadily 
toward  his  supreme  desire."  It  is  as  vain  to 
compute  the  success  of  life  in  terms  of  the 
disagreeable  things  escaped  as  to  reckon  it  by 
the  empty  hours  of  sleep. 

A  truer  symbol  of  life  which  the  playground 
afforded  was  an  old  cloth-covered  prairie 
schooner  preserved  as  an  adjunct  to  a  Wild 
West  show.  Here  was  the  relic  of  a  great 
adventure  in  faith,  hope,  and  love,  and  as  such 
a  symbol  of  life  defined  in  its  highest  terms. 
The  pioneer  who  went  out,  like  Abraham,  "not 
knowing  whither  he  went,"  yet  daring  to  be- 
lieve in  the  future,  a  gentleman  unafraid  of 
the  bright  face  of  danger,  impelled  by  the  love 
of  family  and  kin  to  give  them  a  little  better 
stake  in  life  than  he  began  with — this  man 
lived.  And  as  he  journeyed,  taking  both  joy 
and  sorrow  as  incidental  risks  of  the  road,  he 
cleared  the  way  for  another,  so  that  he  did 

not 

alone 
Conquer  and  come  to  his  goal, 
Leaving  the  rest  in  the  wild. 


42  FARES,  PLEASE! 

This  is  the  life  to  which  our  Master  calls  us, 
a  sharing  in  the  adventure  of  love  which 
chooses  the  spiritual  in  place  of  the  merely 
sensual  and  economic.  It  is  a  pathway  of  joy 
incorruptible,  undefiled,  and  that  fadeth  not 
away. 


VIII 
ON  THE  LINE  OF  DISCOVERY 

Among  all  the  tributes  that  have  been  paid 
to  Gladstone,  one  that  comes  nearest  to  the 
secret  of  the  abounding  vigor  and  freshness 
of  his  ninety-year  span  of  life  was  the  remark 
of  John  Morley :  "He  kept  himself  on  the  line 
of  discovery."  At  an  age  when  most  men 
twenty  years  his  junior  were  completely  occu- 
pied with  the  reminiscences  of  distant  years, 
*his  heart  and  mind  were  busy  with  the  prob- 
lems of  to-morrow.  It  is  a  phrase  which  in- 
terprets the  interest  and  achievement  of  any 
life. 

The  zest  of  life  lies  in  its  ventures.  Kipling 
has  put  into  classic  form  in  his  "Pioneer"  a 
man  who  lived  on  the  line  of  discovery : 

"There's  no  use  in  going  farther,  it's  the  edge  of  culti- 
vation." 
So  they  said  and  I  believed  it;  broke  my  ground  and 
sowed  my  crop; 
Built  my  barns  and  strung  my  fences  in  a  little  border 
station 
Hid  away  beneath  the  foothills  where  the  trails  run 
out  and  stop. 

43 


44  FARES,  PLEASE! 

But  a  voice  as  clear  as  conscience  rang  interminable 
changes 
On  one  everlasting  whisper,  day  and  night-repeated 

"Something  out  there,  something  hidden — Go  and  look 
behind  the  ranges! 
Something  lost  behind  the  ranges — ^Lost  and  waiting 
for  you — Go!" 

So  he  leaves  the  comforts  of  a  settled  farm,  for 
hardship  and  privation,  drawn  by  the  insistent 
lure  of  discovery. 

We  all  begin  life  on  the  line  of  discovery. 
The  world  is  new  every  morning  and  every 
day  a  fresh  delight.  The  magical  storage 
battery  of  curiosity  supplies  endless  energy 
to  every  faculty.  The  greatest  loss  in  the  years 
that  follow  is  not  so  much  that  they  bring  the 
philosophic  mind,  as  that  with  their  more 
settled  aspect  we  allow  the  familiar  outline 
of  our  little  world  to  become  a  twice-told  tale 
and  stop  discovering.  One  of  the  characters 
in  a  story  by  O.  Henry  says  of  the  town  in 
which  he  lives,  "The  trouble  with  this  place 
is  that  everybody  in  it  dies  when  they  get 
about  twenty-one,  and  they  don't  do  anything 
but  snore  and  toss  around  in  their  sleep  the 
rest  of  their  lives.''  It  is  a  case  of  the  tree 
about  which  one  can  say,  "It  grows,"  becoming 


ON  THE  LINE  OF  DISCOVERY     45 

the  flag  pole  about  which  all  that  can  be  said 
is  "It  grew." 

With  unerring  instinct  Jesus  waged  con- 
tinual war  on  self-satisfaction  as  the  great 
arch  enemy  of  growth.  His  parable  of  the  full 
storehouse,  in  which  the  man  who  says  to  his 
soul  that  he  has  goods  laid  up  for  many  years 
finds  that  in  that  very  hour  his  life  is  gone, 
is  one  that  finds  daily  application.  It  is  true 
of  the  teacher.  When  he  stops  learning  and 
trusts  to  doling  out  the  same  parcels  of  his 
fixed  stock  of  knowledge,  that  very  day  his 
spontaneity,  freshness,  and  contagion,  his  very 
life  as  a  teacher,  is  gone,  and  another  routine 
machine  is  added  to  the  world's  already  over- 
stocked supply.  It  is  the  sad  tragedy  in  the 
life  of  the  preacher  or  other  professional  man 
which  we  call  "the  dead  line." 

Christianity  was  first  called  "the  Way"  be- 
fore any  formal  name  was  given  to  the  reli- 
gion of  Jesus.  It  states  Christian  discipleship 
in  the  right  manner — ^in  terms  of  motion. 
Rightly  apprehended,  being  a  Christian  is  not 
so  much  a  process  of  anchoring  one's  soul  in 
the  haven  of  rest  as  it  is  of  sailing  the  seas 
with  God.  It  keeps  men  on  the  line  of  dis- 
covery. 


46  FARES,  PLEASE! 

Prayer  is  a  sure  line  for  the  discovery  of 
God  and  the  exploration  of  the  hidden  self. 
Jesiis's  idea  of  prayer  lifts  it  out  of  the  realm 
of  a  bargain-counter  transaction  with  the 
world^s  Storekeeper  into  that  of  communion 
with  the  Father.  Prayer  is  to  religion  what 
experiment  is  to  science.  It  is  the  personal 
verification  of  hypotheses  and  probabilities. 
Acting  on  the  faith  that  God  is,  it  finds  him. 
The  effectual  fervent  prayer  of  a  righteous 
man  is  like  the  little  Santa  Maria  setting  out 
from  the  port  of  Spain  on  a  great  voyage  of 
discovery.  And  as  the  evidence  that  it  has 
really  discovered  the  Father  it  brings  back 
the  wonderful  treasure  of  a  changed  life — new 
powers  brought  to  light  in  the  hidden  conti- 
nent of  the  soul. 

By  service  we  keep  ourselves  on  fresh  path- 
ways. "Men  grow  quickly  on  battlefields," 
said  a  wise  French  campaigner.  We  find  our- 
selves through  responsibility  and  effort.  Gen- 
eral Grant,  a  failure  in  the  tannery  at  Galena, 
only  came  to  himself  under  the  spur  of  Shiloh 
and  Vicksburg. 

By  the  cultivation  of  active  sympathies  life 
is  kept  out  of  blind  alleys.  It  is  a  faithful 
saying  and  worthy  of  all  acceptation  that  a 


ON  THE  LINE  OF  DISCOVERY     47 

loving  heart  is  the  beginning  of  all  knowledge. 
Sympathy  is  the  rarest  form  of  travel.  What 
travel  does  for  an  alert  mind,  quickening  the 
sense  of  life,  replacing  a  threadbare  set  of 
thoughts  with  new  interests,  putting  ourselves 
in  the  place  of  another  with  sympathetic  con- 
cern does  for  the  soul.  When  the  prophet 
Ezekiel,  depressed  and  melancholy  in  an  alien 
land,  entered  into  the  lives  of  his  fellow  exiles, 
and  "sat  down  where  they  sat,"  the  somber 
hues  of  dejection  and  despair  which  had 
colored  all  his  thinking  gave  way  to  the  posi- 
tive shades  of  love  and  faith.  We  speak  com- 
placently of  "mellow  old  age,"  as  though  it 
were  mellow  of  necessity.  It  is  just  as  apt 
to  be  sour.  It  will  be  sour  and  the  heart 
shriveled,  unless  it  finds  new  leaseholds  on 
freshness  and  unselfishness  by  a  real  stake  in 
the  lives  of  others. 

After  all,  there  is  only  one  sure  line  of  dis- 
covery. It  is  itself  one  of  the  great  spiritual 
discoveries  of  Jesus — "He  that  loseth  his  life 
shall  find  it." 


IX 
GETTING  INTO  SOCIETY 

Getting  into  Society  is  a  popular  game. 

During  wars  and  rumors  of  wars  we  are 
continually  regaled  with  vivid  accounts  of  the 
invasion  of  New  York  by  some  possible  enemy. 
But  these  highly  imaginative  invasions  are 
never  so  interesting  as  the  real  invasion  of 
the  city  which  goes  on  every  year.  There  is 
the  invasion  from  Europe,  running  into  the 
hundred  thousands;  the  invasion  from  the 
country  of  young  men  and  women,  coming  up 
to  seek  their  fortune  in  the  whirlpool.  And 
much  less  noble,  but  not  less  real,  the  yearly 
invasion  of  people  who  have  made  their  for- 
tune in  other  places  and  who  seek  the  city  to 
"break  into  Society." 

It  is  played  with  the  most  feverish  spirit 
by  tliose  who  lack  most  conspicuously  any 
inner  standards  of  worth,  and  who  must  keep 
alive  their  sense  of  personal  significance  by 
all  sorts  of  outward  recognition.  This  abode 
of  the  Blessed,  the  Elysian  fields  of  Society 

48 


GETTING  INTO  SOCIETY  49 

with  a  big  S,  has  been  well  compared  to  the 
ladderlike  arrangement  of  the  Hindu  caste 
system,  where  one  must  kiss  the  feet  of  the  one 
above  and  kick  the  face  of  the  one  beneath. 
So  the  gentle  art  of  snobbery  goes  on  to  new 
refinements  among  those  whose  only  measure 
of  personal  position  is  the  wholly  negative  one 
of  exclusiveness. 

It  is  a  game  for  small  stakes,  which  Thack- 
eray has  pictured  in  immortal  fashion  in 
Vanity  Fair.  "What  I  want  to  make,"  he 
wrote  to  his  mother,  speaking  of  the  novel,  "is 
a  set  of  people  living  without  God  in  the 
world,  only  that  is  a  cant  phrase."  How  well 
he  succeeded.  Lord  Steyne,  Sir  Pitt  Crawley, 
poor  stupid  Joe  Sedley,  and  Becky,  above  all, 
answer  in  their  own  way. 

To  dress,  to  call,  to  dine,  to  break 

No  canon  of  the  social  code. 
The  little  laws  that  lackeys  make. 

The  futile  decalogue  of  mode — 
How  many  a  soul  for  these  things  lives 

With  pious  passion,  grave  intent! 
And  never  even  in  dreams  has  seen 

The  things  that  are  more  excellent! 

Yet  the  very  object  of  this  trivial  game,  when 
conceived  in  a  true  manner,  may  be  made  one 


50  FARES,  PLEASE! 

of  the  largest  and  most  worthy  aims  in  life. 
To  get  one  into  society  that  is  really  worth 
getting  into  is  the  end  both  of  education  and 
religion.  Education  is  a  process  of  social  ad- 
justment. Its  aim  is  to  develop  the  individual 
and  bring  him  into  the  most  helpful  social 
relationship  with  his  fellows.  It  is  a  large 
function  of  religion  to  lead  men  into  inspiring 
fellowship  with  great  souls,  and  to  initiate 
them  into  the  great  society  of  the  helpers  of 
the  race. 

Books  are  a  sure  and  lasting  means  of  get- 
ting into  good  society.  A  well-selected  library 
is  a  gathering  of  the  great,  admittance  into 
whose  intimacy  brings  more  real  honor  than 
all  the  court  levees  ever  held.  "The  Four 
Hundred"  most  worth  cultivating  are  not 
dressed  in  silk  and  spangled  with  diamonds; 
they  are  bound  in  leather  and  studded  with 
gleaming  thoughts.  Some  one  has  said  of  a 
group  of  young  radicals  in  England  that  they 
climbed  back  stairs  to  dark  attics  and  shut 
themselves  in  with  the  gods.  One  who  in  his 
library  has  never  been  "stung  with  the  splen- 
dor of  a  sudden  thought"  has  much  to  learn 
about  good  society.  The  real  beginning  of  the 
true  life  of  Keats  was  when  as  a  boy  the 


GETTING  INTO  SOCIETY  51 

entrance  into  the  society  of  Homer's  gallery 
of  heroes  was  as  though  "a  new  planet  swung 
into  his  ken/'  Here  is  where  the  Bible  serves 
the  race  in  such  transcendent  manner.  The 
surest  anchorage  of  our  lives  in  times  of  be- 
wilderment and  the  strongest  lodestar  in  times 
of  action  is  in  its  great  souls.  The  man  who 
knows  Paul,  whose  heart  is  no  stranger  to 
the  enthusiasm  of  Isaiah  or  to  the  devotion 
of  John,  who,  above  all,  knows  the  moods  and 
spirit  of  Jesus,  is  in  good  society. 

The  communion  of  saints — the  fellowship  of 
the  redeemed — ^is  the  greatest  society  on  earth. 
That  grand  old  schoolmaster  of  Rugby,  Dr. 
Arnold,  once  said,  "Whenever  I  can  receive 
into  my  care  a  boy  fresh  from  his  father,  with- 
out emotion,  it  is  high  time  for  me  to  be  off." 
No  familiarity  ever  robbed  him  of  the  sense 
of  the  glory  of  his  vocation.  Whenever  we 
can  look  at  the  familiar  sight  of  a  person  join- 
ing the  church,  without  feeling  emotion,  it  is 
high  time  for  us  to  be  off  too. 

It  is  our  reddest  red-letter  day  when  we  get 
into  that  society  whose  names  are  written  on 
His  hands.  When  Jerry  McAuley  was  so 
gloriously  converted  down  in  Water  Street 
there  was  no  mention  of  the  fact  in  the  society 


52  FARES,  PLEASE! 

columns  in  the  New  York  newspapers.  It  was 
the  greatest  social  event  of  the  year,  neverthe- 
less. He  had  joined  the  immortals  who  here 
on  earth  were  living  in  the  power  of  an  end- 
less life.  At  one  time  when  Mark  Twain  had 
received  an  invitation  to  dine  with  the  em- 
peror of  Germany,  his  little  daughter  said, 
innocently,  to  him,  "You'll  soon  know  every- 
body except  God,  won't  you,  papa?"  There 
was  real  pathos  in  the  question.  What  mat- 
ters a  dozen  kings  or  so  on  our  calling  list,  if 
it  is  to  be  a  case  of  "everybody  except  God"  ? 

Have  you  ever  joined  the  International 
Order  of  the  Helpers  of  Men?  It  has  never 
been  unanimously  popular.  It  was  founded 
by  One  who  is  still  regarded  as  a  trifle  eccen- 
tric in  many  quarters.  Its  charter  reads :  "Let 
him  that  is  great  among  you  be  your  minister." 
The  Roman  satirist,  Lucian,  long  ago  pointed 
out  the  fact  that  its  basic  idea  was  absurd — 
that  of  being  brothers.  But  it  includes  those 
of  whom  the  world  is  not  worthy.  O,  if  with 
the  thousand  and  one  lodges  and  societies  we 
belong  to,  we  would  only  join  the  human  race 
— feel  the  pulse  of  its  brotherhood,  its  twinge 
of  pain  as  our  own  and  lay  its  burden  on  our 
shoulders!    When  we  get  into  that  company 


GETTING  INTO  SOCIETY  53 

we  do  not  merely  ornament  a  drawing  room 
for  an  hour,  but  shine  as  the  stars,  forever  and 
ever. 

"There  is  one  great  society  on  earth,  the 
noble  living  and  the  noble  dead." 


THE  SUNNY  SIDE  OF  TEN 

"Of  such  is  the  kingdom  of  heaven." 

Most  of  us  remember  some  lines  back  in  our 
old  copybooks,  which  ran  like  this : 

Give  to  the  world  the  best  that  you  have. 
And  the  best  will  come  back  to  you. 

In  no  place  is  the  old  truth  so  true  as  in  the 
entrance  requirement  of  the  kingdom  of  God, 
"Except  ye  become  as  little  children,  ye  shall 
not  enter  the  kingdom  of  God."  The  Master 
demands  the  very  best  we  have — the  childlike 
qualities  of  teachableness  and  faith.  It  is  an 
inexorable  condition  that  we  bring  these.  But 
the  return  which  he  makes,  good  measure, 
pressed  down  and  running  over,  is  that  he 
enables  us  to  keep  unwithered  by  age  and  un- 
spoiled by  custom  those  very  qualities  of  child- 
hood. To  be  a  member  of  the  Kingdom  is  to 
keep  oneself  forever  on  the  sunny  side  of  ten. 

James  Russell  Lowell,  when  passing  once,  in 
the  outskirts  of  Boston,  a  building  which  bore 

54 


THE  SUNNY  SIDE  OF  TEN         55 

the  inscription,  "Home  for  Incurable  Chil- 
dren," said,  playfully,  to  a  friend,  "They'll  get 
me  in  there  some  day."  That  is  just  what  he 
was — an  incurable  child,  carrying  over  into 
his  last  years  an  irrepressible  youthfulness  of 
heart.  That  is  what  a  real  member  of  the 
Kingdom  is — an  incurable  child. 

On  the  sunny  side  of  ten  there  is  an  atmos- 
phere of  trust.  Have  you  ever  thought  of  how 
much  of  the  glory  of  childhood  comes  from  the 
unruffled  calm  of  its  trust?  It  is  only  gradu- 
ally that  we  come  to  realize  that  the  years 
that  set  as  lightly  on  our  shoulders  as  a  June 
TTreeze  were  years  of  intense  strain  and  re- 
sponsibility to  our  fathers  and  mothers.  The 
child's  world  is  a  garden  of  delight  because 
its  boundless  trust  makes  everything  in  it 
bloom  as  a  spring  day  touches  a  valley  and 
calls  forth  its  beauty.  Unsophisticated  cre- 
dulity is  a  childish  thing,  to  be  put  away  when 
one  becomes  a  man.  But  a  childlike  trust  is 
part  of  our  permanent  inheritance  as  joint 
heirs  of  Jesus  Christ.  "He  careth  for  you." 
"He  knoweth  our  frame."  "He  knoweth  the 
way  that  I  take."  "He  knoweth  you  have  need 
of  these  things."  A  doctor  told  a  student  who 
complained  of  headaches  and  whose  window 


56  FARES,  PLEASE! 


looked  off  into  empty  space  that  he  needed 
something  in  his  view  to  "lean  his  eyes  up 
against."  It  is  a  good  thing  to  lean  our  eyes 
up  against  the  background  of  the  God  and 
Father  of  our  Lord  Jesus  Christ. 

The  child  lives  in  the  present.  To  a  child 
on  a  picnic  there  has  been  no  yesterday ;  there 
will  be  no  to-morrow.  "One  crowded  hour  of 
glorious  life''  is  his.  He  is  unvexed  by  past 
regrets  or  future  fears,  while  we,  his  elders, 
live  so  largely  in  the  day  before  yesterday  or 
the  middle  of  next  week.  Dr.  William  Osier 
tells  us  the  problem  of  happiness  is  a  very 
simple  one.  It  consists  merely  in  pressing 
two  buttons,  one  of  which  shuts  off  the  past 
and  the  other  shuts  off  the  future.  Two 
buttons,  that  is  all.  So  beautifully  simple! 
It  is  too  bad  that  he  neglects  to  tell  us  just 
how  to  do  it!  He  who  has  the  keys  of  life 
and  death  is  the  only  one  who  can  push  the 
buttons.  "As  a  thick  cloud  have  I  blotted  out 
thy  transgressions" ;  that  is  the  only  assurance 
which  can  shut  out  the  peace-destroying  past. 
"I  will  not  leave  thee  nor  forsake  thee";  that 
is  what  lifts  the  cloud  of  future  fears.  The 
Christian  who  is  persuaded  that  He  is  able  to 
keep  that  which  he  has  committed  unto  Him, 


THE  SUNNY  SIDE  OF  TEN         57 

may  live  as  fully  in  the  present  as  the  most 
care-free  child.  The  Jewish  religion  in  the 
time  of  Christ  knew  only  two  days — yester- 
day and  to-morrow.  It  is  highly  significant 
that  the  first  recorded  word  of  Jesus's  public 
ministry  was  the  word  "to-day.^'  "To-day"  is 
the  day  of  salvation,  of  opportunity,  of  joy. 

On  the  sunny  side  of  ten  we  live  in  an  ideal 
world. 

When  I  was  a  beggarly  boy 

And  lived  in  a  cellar  damp, 
I  had  not  a  friend  nor  a  toy, 

But  I  had  Aladdin's  lamp. 
When  I  could  not  sleep  for  the  cold, 

I  had  fire  enough  in  my  brain. 
And  builded  with  roofs  of  gold 

My  beautiful  castles  in  Spain. 

The  world  is  full,  then,  of  ideal  personages 
and  ideal  forces.  Prince  Charming  may  ap- 
pear from  around  the  corner  at  any  time.  The 
pot  of  gold  is  at  the  end  of  the  rainbow  if  we 
only  hurry  fast  enough.  The  youthful  Cole- 
ridge walking  down  the  street,  swinging  his 
arms  wildly,  accidentally  hits  an  old  gentle- 
man on  the  head  and  pauses  politely  to  ex- 
plain that  he  is  cutting  off  the  heads  of  Turk- 
ish infidels  with  his  scimitar.  From  this  realm 
of  the  ideal  we  emerge  into  what  is  called  the 


58  FARES,  PLEASE! 

real  world,  and  a  glory  has  departed.  But 
the  man  of  Christian  faith,  to  whom  God  and 
the  increasing  purpose  which  runs  through  the 
ages  are  realities,  lives  in  an  ideal  world. 
Creation  to  him  is  not  a  dreary  mechanism  of 
interlocked  wheels,  for  the  earnest  expectation 
of  the  creature  waiteth  for  the  manifestation 
of  the  sons  of  God.  His  Kingdom  is  an  ever- 
lasting Kingdom,  and  its  members  have  the 
dew  of  their  youth. 

Ponce  de  Leon  set  out  in  the  wrong  direc- 
tion to  discover  the  fountain  of  youth.  It  is 
not  in  the  everglades  of  Florida.  It  is  the 
eternal  spring,  a  "well  by  the  gate"  in  Beth- 
lehem of  Judaea. 


XI 
A  BINET  TEST  FOR  DEFECTIVES 

Society  is  at  last  beginning  to  pay  some 
attention  to  its  ill-favored  stepchildren.  Re- 
versing the  policy  of  centuries  of  giving  nearly 
all  its  thought  and  care  to  its  promising  off- 
spring, it  is  acting  on  the  discovery  that 
schools  should  be  not  alone  for  the  exceptional 
boy  or  girl,  or  even  for  the  normal  child.  Its 
latest  venture  is  in  schools  for  the  backward, 
the  defective  and  subnormal.  By  looking  at 
their  needs,  not  with  the  eyes  of  unthinking 
tradition,  but  with  intelligence  lighted  by 
love,  it  is  doing  wonderful  things  in  preparing 
for  life  the  crippled  in  body  and  mind. 

The  first  step  in  such  a  work  is  to  find  out 
the  degree  of  mental  normality  of  a  child.  One 
of  the  most  approved  and  scientific  methods 
is  what  is  known  as  the  "Binet  Test  for  Defec- 
tives," so  called  from  its  inventor.  It  consists 
of  a  number  of  simple  questions  and  opera- 
tions which  readily  disclose  the  degree  of 
deficiency  of  eyesight  or  hearing,  keenness  of 

59 


60  FARES,  PLEASE! 

observation,  muscular  response,  and  power  of 
mental  coordination.  On  the  basis  of  this  test 
the  means  and  methods  of  education  are  deter- 
mined. 

If  a  test  similar  to  that  used  for  mental 
capacity  in  the  schools  could  be  devised  to 
determine  the  degree  of  spiritual  efficiency  of 
the  members  of  the  church,  it  would  be  the 
means  of  large  usefulness.  Spiritual  capacity 
and  usefulness,  of  course,  can  never  be  meas- 
ured by  any  kind  of  a  machine,  however 
cleverly  constructed,  nor  judged  by  any  list  of 
superficial  questions.  We  have  seen  too  many 
disastrous  snap  judgments  formed  on  the  basis 
of  the  church's  meeting  or  failing  to  meet  some 
arbitrary  and  mechanical  test  which  seems  so 
important  to  the  one  who  makes  it  that  all 
else  is  left  out  of  consideration.  We  have 
grown  exceedingly  weary  of  the  dismal 
prophet  who  tells  us  that  the  prayer  meeting 
is  the  "barometer  of  the  church,"  and  bewails 
the  approach  of  dark  and  stormy  days  when- 
ever the  attendance  (or  the  noise,  perhaps) 
fails  to  register  one  hundred  per  cent. 

Yet  as  those  who  are  urged  to  show  them- 
selves approved  workmen,  the  consideration 
of  what  would  be  some  elements  of  a  real  test 


A  TEST  FOR  DEFECTIVES         61 

of  fundamental  deficiency  in  the  Master's 
service  ought  to  be  a  vital  one.  It  is  not 
primarily  a  test  of  character  which  is  pro- 
posed, or  of  sincerity  or  intent.  We  will 
make  a  large  assumption  and  take  those  for 
granted.  It  would,  rather,  be  along  the  lines 
of  the  Binet  Test — one  of  Christian  sense- 
development  and  nerve  response.  One  vital  test 
of  deficiency  in  service  for  every  member  and 
every  church  would  certainly  be  the  question : 
How  far  can  you  seef  It  is  easy  enough  to 
see  the  things  that  lie  right  in  front  of  us  in 
our  routine  work ;  it  is  not  so  easy  to  see  over 
the  hill  of  the  years  and  catch  a  vision  of  the 
value  of  unspectacular  long-range  work.  But 
it  is  far  more  important.  It  is  easy  to  see  the 
value  of  getting  Mr.  Brown,  the  cashier  of  the 
First  National  Bank,  into  the  church,  but  it 
is  quite  another  thing  to  see  the  value  of  hold- 
ing and  training  the  little  freckle-faced, 
red-headed  Jones  boy,  who  does  nothing  in 
Sunday  school  but  throw  paper  wads,  to  every- 
body's annoyance.  The  chances  are  that  the 
latter  is  much  more  strategic.  The  financial 
results  of  a  church  supper  are  far  more  satisfy- 
ing than  the  deficit  incurred  by  a  girls'  club, 
viewed  from  a  one-  or  two-year  standpoint, 


62  FARES,  PLEASE! 

which  is  the  one  usually  employed.  Carlyle 
said  of  Maeaulay  that  he  had  spectacles  in- 
stead of  eyes.  Spectacles,  seeing  only  the 
outward  and  obvious,  will  never  serve  for  eyes 
in  the  work  of  the  Kingdom.  The  long-range 
vision  which  plans  for  twenty  years  hence  is 
necessary.  "No  one  ought  to  be  satisfied," 
says  Dr.  Cabot,  "to  test  his  work  by  any  easier 
standards  than  these:  First,  am  I  seeing  all 
the  actual  facts,  the  ever  new  and  unique  facts 
as  they  come  before  me?  Second,  am  I  trac- 
ing out,  as  far  as  I  can,  the  full  bearing,  the 
true  lesson  of  this  movement  or  situation?" 
It  would  be  an  immeasurable  boon  to  the 
statesmanship  of  the  church  if  these  tests  were 
to  become  part  of  its  inner  consciousness.  The 
church  without  a  definite  sacrificial  policy  for 
its  boys  and  girls  has  been  well  compared  to 
a  dog  which  is  being  shipped  by  express  and 
has  chewed  up  its  tag.  It  is  going  somewhere, 
but  no  one  knows  just  where. 

An  agent  of  Tammany  Hall  in  June,  1915, 
refused  to  take  a  lease  on  a  piece  of  property 
desired  for  a  new  building  for  the  organization 
because  he  could  secure  it  for  only  two  terms 
of  ninety-nine  years  each !  It  recalls  some  old 
words  about  the  children  of  this  world  being 


A  TEST  FOR  DEFECTIVES  63 

wiser  in  their  generation  than  the  children  of 
light.  How  much  more  essential  is  long-range 
vision  to  the  Christian  statesman! 

Give  me  not  scenes  more  charming;  give  me  eyes 
To  see  the  beauty  that  around  me  lies; 
To  see  the  charm  of  souls,  see  angels  shy 
Among  the  faces  of  the  passers-by. 

How  quick  is  your  motor  response?  The 
lapse  of  time  between  the  mental  impression 
and  its  expression  in  muscular  reaction  is 
made  of  crucial  importance  in  gauging  the 
fineness  of  mental  organization.  It  has  the 
same  cardinal  place  in  measuring  spiritual 
efficiency.  It  was  a  principle  of  Queen  Eliza- 
beth's— to  which  we  owe  the  result  that 
American  civilization  is  Anglo-Saxon  instead 
of  Latin — that  discovery  without  possession 
was  without  avail.  The  knowledge  of  spiritual 
truth  without  real  possession  by  life  response 
is  equally  futile.  The  response  of  the  defective 
is  like  the  theological  student  to  whom  the 
call  for  missionary  service  came  and  who  an- 
swered, "Lord,  here  am  I ;  send  John." 

A  lady  was  being  congratulated  on  her  son's 
making  the  football  team  at  college,  and  was 
asked  what  position  he  played.  "I  don't 
know,"  she  answered,  "but  I  think  he  is  one 


64  FARES,  PLEASE! 

of  the  drawbacks/'  It  may  have  been  true. 
Many  a  player,  with  all  the  assistance  of  a 
fully  equipped  uniform,  is  not  really  a  half- 
back but  only  a  drawback.  And  when  our 
response  to  the  truth  is  slow  and  indistinct, 
that  is  our  real  position.  The  church  does  not 
need  guards  so  much  as  it  needs  tackles  in 
its  ground-gaining  offense.  "Acts  may  be  for- 
given," says  Stevenson,  "but  God  himself  can- 
not forgive  the  hanger-back." 


XII 
WHAT'S  THE  NEWS? 

"Will  there  be  any  newspapers  in  heaven, 
papa?"  asked  seven-years. 

Father  was  an  editor  and  his  reply  was 
brief :  "I  hope  not." 

No  doubt  the  people  who  have  been  inter- 
viewed for  the  press  very  often  will  be  unani- 
mous in  the  opinion  that  there  could  not  be  a 
newspaper  in  heaven  because  there  will  be  no 
reporters  there.  It  raises  a  suggestive  ques- 
tion as  to  just  what  would  be  deemed  worthy 
of  chronicle  in  a  daily  record  of  the  events  of 
earth  seen  in  the  light  of  heaven's  standards, 
where  not  the  outward  appearance  but  the 
final  value  was  seen.  It  is  not  so  extravagant 
a  fancy  either.  For,  surely,  in  that  Eye  which 
neithers  slumbers  nor  sleeps  and  which  notes 
even  the  sparrow's  fall,  all  things  are  unerr- 
ingly noted  as  either  trivial  or  great. 

Such  a  record  would  be  so  different  from  the 
morning  paper  which  is  served  up  with  our 
breakfast  that  it  would  be  hard  to  recognize 

65 


66  FAEES,  PLEASE! 

our  world  through  its  pages.  On  that  much 
we  could  all  agree.  We  place  hourly  depend- 
ence on  the  paper  to  keep  us  in  touch  with  the 
world,  and  life  in  the  modern  world  would  be 
almost  inconceivable  without  it.  Yet  we 
realize  that  in  them  we  see  through  a  glass 
darkly.  The  truth  is  only  approximated.  A 
parade  of  mourners  for  those  lost  in  a  factory 
fire  was  held  in  New  York  in  April,  1911.  The 
headlines  in  the  different  papers  the  next  day 
ran  thus:  60,000  parade— Globe ;  122,000 
parade  in  rain — World;  Estimate  of  200,000 
exceeded — Evening  Sun;  300,000  in  parade 
—Telegram;  50,000  walked— Sun;  80,000 
marched — Tribune ;  100,000  pass  in  pageant — 
Mail.  "What  is  truth?''  might  well  be  a  fair 
question ! 

Even  in  the  most  conservative  papers,  the 
seamy,  feverish,  and  sensational  aspects  of  life 
bulk  out  of  their  real  proportion.  A  Euro- 
pean reading  American  journals  might  be  for- 
given for  concluding  that  we  are  degenerating, 
since  the  crimes,  scandals,  and  divorces  are 
served  up  with  such  embellishment.  One 
needs  to  read  papers  like  the  Survey  and  the 
reviews  to  keep  his  balance  and  learn  the 
world's  real  constructive  work.     Stevenson's 


WHAT^S  THE  NEWS?  67 

complaint  is  well  justified:  "So  long  as  an 
artist  is  on  his  head,  is  painting  with  a  flute, 
or  writes  with  an  etching  needle,  or  conducts 
an  orchestra  with  a  meatax,  all  is  well,  and 
plaudits  shower  along  with  the  roses.  But 
any  plain  man  who  tries  to  follow  the  unobtru- 
sive canons  of  his  art  is  but  a  commonplace 
figure." 

The  thought  of  what  the  relative  importance 
of  the  day's  happenings  would  be  in  heaven's 
eyes,  leads  us  to  two  truths  about  news  that 
should  never  be  allowed  to  grow  dim. 

1.  The  real  news  of  any  time  is  the  working 
of  forces  that  are  making  to-morrow.  Had 
you  asked  a  citizen  of  Rome  in  Nero's  time, 
"What's  the  news?"  he  would  have  told  you 
that  the  triumph  in  the  Forum  that  day  was 
the  biggest  thing  in  the  world.  Whereas,  we 
know  from  the  vantage  point  of  to-day  that 
the  real  news  was  that  a  little  Christian  prayer 
meeting  was  held  down  in  the  catacombs. 
That  was  the  force  that  was  making  a  new 
civilization.  Beside  it  all  the  triumphs  the 
Forum  ever  saw  were  about  as  important  as 
the  buzzing  of  a  fly.  An  Englishman  in  the 
early  part  of  the  eighteenth  century  on  being 
asked  the  same  question  would  have  told  you 


68  FARES,  PLEASE! 

something  about  Parliament.  He  did  not 
dream  that  the  greatest  event  of  a  half  century 
was  the  fact  that  up  there  in  the  Epworth 
rectory  the  tired  and  overworked  mother  of  a 
large  family  was  teaching  her  children  to  pray. 
Yet  it  is  only  a  matter  of  sober  history  that  in 
the  quiet  and  obscure  rectory  was  being 
shaped  the  force  that  was  not  only  to  revitalize 
England  but  also  to  bless  the  whole  world.  It 
is  in  the  light  of  such  truth  that  we  must  open 
our  eyes  on  to-day  and  realize  that  wherever 
any  personal  force  for  the  blessing  of  the  days 
to  come*  is  being  shaped,  there  is  the  real  news 
as  God  sees  it. 

2.  Hence  the  street  corner  test  is  never  the 
true  test  The  blatant  noise  which  it  makes 
on  the  street  is  no  test  of  the  importance  of 
anything.  A  newspaper  in  heaven  would  have 
a  page  of  trade  reports,  but  it  would  not  be 
filled  with  stock  quotations  and  bank  clear- 
ings. The  giving  of  the  Widow's  Mite  would 
be  worthy  of  an  extra  edition,  for  it  was  the 
largest  financial  transaction  that  ever  took 
place  on  the  planet  in  i.ts  influence.  Here  is 
a  man  who  in  the  face  of  great  temptation  is 
holding  on  to- his  honor  and  keeping  faith  with 
his  noblest  self.    That  is  the  biggest  thing  in 


.WHAT'S  THE  NEWS?  69 

the  trade  reports,  as  God  views  them.  Here 
is  an  invalid  blessing  her  little  circle  with 
unfailing  patience  and  cheer.  That  is  real 
news.  Here  is  a  woman  going  down  to  the 
slums  of  the  city,  putting  herself  into  the  lives 
of  the  unprivileged.  Nothing  in  the  city  out- 
ranks the  record  of  her  day. 

The  man  who  truly  sees  is  never  overawed 
by  mere  noise.  The  greatest  actions  are  done 
in  small  struggles.  There  are  noble  and  mys- 
terious triumphs  which  no  eye  sees  save  God's, 
no  renown  rewards,  and  no  flare  of  trumpets 
salutes.  But  they  are  entered  in  his  Book  of 
Eemembrance. 


XIII 
THREE  CHAIRS 

In  his  description  of  the  cabin  in  which  he 
spent  those  memorable  days  on  Walden  Pond, 
Thoreau  says  that  his  sitting  room  contained 
three  chairs — one  for  solitude,  two  for  friend- 
ship, and  three  for  crowds.  There  can  be  no 
doubt  that  the  favorite  one  with  Thoreau  was 
the  single  chair  that  represented  solitude,  but 
he  was  wise  enough  to  realize  that  even  for 
one  like  himself,  who  could  make  such  splen- 
did use  of  solitude,  the  isolated  life  is  incom- 
plete. 

Thoreau's  three  chairs  well  represented  to 
him  the  furnishing  of  the  ideal  living  room. 
This  complete  furnishing  is  by  no  means  so 
common  as  we  might  imagine.  Everyone 
moves  in  a  superficial  way,  at  least,  in  the 
three  concentric  circles  of  himself,  his  friends, 
and  the  world.  But  the  concentration  in  one 
to  the  virtual  exclusion  of  the  others  is  far 
from  rare.  Perhaps  the  person  represented  by 
the  three  chairs  is  the  most  common — the  man 

70 


THREE  CHAIRS  71 

who  lives  in  the  crowd  with  its  changing 
scenes  and  outward  interests,  but  who,  if  he 
is  thrown  on  his  own  resources  for  a  week,  is 
unable  to  rub  one  thought  against  another  for 
his  own  entertainment,  and  suffers  terrible 
pangs  of  ennui.  At  the  other  extreme  there 
are  the  souls  which,  whether  very  much  like 
stars  or  not,  dwell  apart,  and  neither  ask  much 
from  society  nor  give  much  to  it. 

One  chair.  It  is  a  poorly  furnished  house 
that  does  not  have  its  chair  for  solitude.  "We 
are  too  busy,  too  encumbered,  too  much  occu- 
pied." It  is  Amiel  who  is  speaking.  "In  in- 
action which  is  meditative  and  attentive  the 
wrinkles  of  the  soul  are  smoothed  away. 
Reverie,  like  the  rain  of  night,  restores  color 
and  force  to  the  thoughts  which  have  been 
blanched  and  wearied  by  the  heat  of  the  day." 
A  celebrated  philosopher  while  out  making 
visits  one  afternoon  turned  in  at  his  own  door 
to  pay  a  call  without  realizing  that  he  lived 
there  himself.  There  is  no  better  place  at 
which  to  pay  a  call,  for  we  come  to  a  sorry 
pass  indeed  when  w^e  have  a  long  list  of  ac- 
quaintances, but  know  as  little  of  our  inner 
selves  as  of  Afghanistan.  To  pay  a  visit  to 
ourselves  and  learn  what  manner  of  men  we 


72  FARES,  PLEASE! 

are  is  an  indispensable  condition  of  growth, 
mental  as  well  as  spiritual.  It  is  a  very  differ- 
ent thing  from  a  weakening  indulgence  in 
sentimental  introspection,  with  the  sad  results 
of  which  we  are  all  too  familiar.  Walt  Whit- 
man voiced  a  sturdy  and  very  healthy  protest 
against  this  kind  of  morbid  self-questioning: 
"It  is  as  though  we  should  sit  down  to  a  meal 
and  ask,  Why  do  I  eat?  Why  does  this  taste 
good?'  or  on  a  summer  day,  Why  do  I  feel  so 
good  in  the  glory  of  the  sun?'  Why?  Why? 
Why?  Everlastingly  picking  life  to  pieces  in- 
stead of  living."  Avoiding  this  extreme,  how- 
ever, there  is  still  the  other,  that  of  keeping 
our  minds  so  hospitable  to  outward  things  that 
we  have  never  courage  to  fathom  the  rush  of 
outside  interests  and  find  out  the  real  rock 
bottom  of  our  own  beings.  To  let  our  interest 
wander  in  every  direction  comes  to  the  same 
thing  as  having  no  interest  in  anything.  The 
only  way  in  which  we  profit  by  our  experiences 
is  in  selecting  those  we  choose  to  possess  and  in 
the  chair  of  solitude  to  study,  weigh,  and  make 
them  our  own.  Rabbi  Hillel  used  to  dismiss 
his  classes  saying,  "You  may  go  now;  I  have 
a  guest  to  entertain.''  The  "guest"  was  his 
own  soul. 


THREE  CHAIRS  73 

Character  needs  solitude.  We  can  never 
estimate  the  part  played  in  the  life  of  Lincoln 
by  the  fact  that  his  early  years  were  set  amid 
the  great  brooding  places  of  the  earth,  the 
silences  of  the  hills  and  forest.  With  space 
for  contemplation  and  reverie,  he  thought 
things  through.  John  R.  Mott  has  finely  put 
the  whole  plea  for  meditation  and  prayer — 
^^The  streams  that  turn  the  machinery  of  the 
world,  take  their  rise  in  solitary  places." 

Two  chairs  for  Friendship.  Is  it  true  that 
close  and  intimate  friendships  are  going  out 
of  fashion,  just  like  family  carriages,  hoop- 
skirts,  and  other  quaint  customs  of  departed 
days?  If  it  is,  we  are  paying  a  heavy  price 
for  the  inventions  which  have  supplanted 
them.  There  is  no  doubt  that  the  better  means 
of  communication,  the  endless  multiplication  of 
books,  and  the  higher  gearing  of  speed  in  the 
present  days,  have  made  us  less  willing  to  give 
up  the  time  the  formation  and  growth  of  an 
intimate  friendship  requires.  There  are  other 
costs  in  frankness  and  humility.  But  the 
aspect  of  life  represented  by  two  chairs  is  one 
of  the  richest  and  as  we  look  over  the  story 
of  the  most  fruitful  lives  we  find  again  and 
again  the  central  turning  point  to  have  been 


74  FAKES,  PLEASE! 

the  formation  of  some  fine  friendship  of  last- 
ing inspiration. 

Three  Chairs  for  Crowds,  Not  large  crowds 
for  most  of  us.  Only  a  few  ever  live  to  count 
their  influence  in  multitudes.  But  for  all  of 
us  there  is  the  danger  of  a  premature  satisfac- 
tion in  a  few  choice  fellowships  and  withdraw- 
ing ourselves  from  the  larger  circle  of  those 
in  whose  lives  we  could  fill  some  real  want, 
but  who  are  less  personally  attractive.  That 
ever-present  remembrance  in  the  mind  of 
Jesus  deserves  a  place  with  all :  "Other  sheep 
have  I  which  are  not  of  this  fold."  One  of  the 
most  instructive  things  in  his  life  was  the 
intense  degree  with  which  he  loved  the  close 
fellowship  of  congenial  friends,  the  rare  home 
at  Bethany,  and  the  reenforcement  of  that 
inner  circle  of  Peter,  James,  and  John.  Yet 
he  withdrew  so  rarely  with  these.  They  never 
obscured  his  eyes  to  that  farther  vision  of  the 
fields  white  unto  harvest,  the  harassed  multi- 
tudes of  sheep  without  a  shepherd. 


XIV 
HOW  MUCH  ARE  YOU  WORTH? 

When  Li  Hung  Chang  was  visiting  America 
a  number  of  years  ago  he  had  a  very  discon- 
certing way  of  asking  people  he  met,  with 
Oriental  blandness,  "How  much  are  you 
worth?"  Occasionally  he  followed  it  with  one 
very  much  more  embarrassing  in  certain  quar- 
ters :  "How  did  you  get  it?" 

It  is  not  a  very  usual  question,  nor  perhaps 
a  polite  one,  but  it  is  a  fair  one,  and  we  cannot 
hope  to  permanently  avoid  it.  How  much  are 
you  worth? 

The  chemist  has  a  ready  answer.  Suppos- 
ing you  weigh  about  one  hundred  and  fifty 
pounds,  he  can  tell  you  to  a  cent  your  material 
value.  A  French  chemist  has  figured  you  out 
exactly.  You  are  worth  about  eight  dollars! 
There  are  in  your  body  enough  by-products  to 
make  an  ordinary  iron  nail,  enough  salt  to  fill 
an  ordinary  salt  cellar,  enough  sugar  to  fill 
a  small  sugar  bowl,  enough  lime  to  whitewash 
a  chicken  coop,  enough  phosphorus  to  make  a 
dozen  matches,  enough  magnesia  for  one  dose. 

75 


76  FARES,  PLEASE! 

The  albumenoids  could  be  used  by  a  tricky 
baker  to  replace  the  whites  of  a  hundred  eggs, 
and  there  would  be  fat  enough  to  fill  a  ten- 
pound  pot.  Perhaps  if  you  weigh  two  hundred 
pounds  you  are  worth  a  little  more.  You  are 
worth  about  nine  dollars  and  fifty  cents.  But 
you  will  say,  "I  object  to  having  my  value 
stated  in  terms  of  physical  by-products."  Very 
well.    Step  on  another  scale. 

The  'business  man  has  a  ready  answer.  The 
average  cost  of  the  upbringing  of  a  child  from 
birth  to  the  age  of  twenty  is  $4,150  and  its 
average  commercial  value  at  that  time  is 
$4,000.  These  figures  are  based  on  the  net  earn- 
ing capacity  of  the  average  citizen  for  all  the 
gainful  occupations  in  California,  capitalized 
at  six  per  cent  interest.  As  an  investment  it  is 
estimated  that  by  the  age  of  thirty  years  the 
average  man  is  worth  $16,000 — $4,000  value, 
plus  $12,000  gross  earnings,  and  has  cost  $10,- 
150  to  maintain,  or  a  net  gain  of  $5,850  in 
thirty  years.  The  same  figure,  $5,000,  is  about 
what  is  awarded  by  the  court  when  a  suit  for 
damages  is  brought  against  a  railroad  for  the 
accidental  death  of  an  adult  man. 

Now,  $5,000  is  a  good  deal  more  than  eight 
or  nine-fifty,  but  it  is  not  much  more  satis- 


HOW  MUCH  ARE  YOU  WORTH  ?      77 

factory.  Few  of  us  will  be  content  to  have 
ourselves  measured  by  the  same  measure  used 
for  corn  and  coal.  Some  one  will  say,  "You 
can't  measure  value  without  brains.  It  is 
mental  capacity  which  determines  values."  So 
The  educator  has  his  answer.  It  is  not  so 
easy  to  compute  by  rough  processes,  but  it  has 
alluring  suggestions.  The  artist  Millet  buys 
some  canvas  and  a  few  paints  for  sixty  cents, 
and  paints  the  "Angelus,"  which  sells  for 
1105,000.  Results :  raw  material,  sixty  cents ; 
value  of  brains,  |104,999.40.  Pig  iron  is  worth 
f20  a  ton;  made  into  horse  shoes,  |90;  knife 
blades,  |200 ;  watch  springs,  $1,000.  Raw  ma- 
terial worth,  $20;  brains,  $980.  This  looks 
more  like  sense — a  man  is  worth  what  he  can 
do.  But  to  rest  value  on  mental  capacity  alone 
is  poor  calculation.  The  warden  of  Sing  Sing 
Prison,  in  New  York,  said  to  a  visitor  whom 
he  was  showing  through  the  prison,  "We  have 
here  a  first-class  college  faculty.  There  is 
not  a  college  subject  which  could  not  be  well 
taught  by  some  one  of  the  prisoners."  Here 
was  a  wealth  of  mental  ability,  yet  so  far  from 
being  of  value  to  society,  its  possessors  were 
so  much  of  a  detriment  that  they  had  to  be 
restrained  by  iron  gratings. 


78  FARES,  PLEASE! 

The  directing  force  is  the  final  arbiter  of  a 
man's  worth,  and  the  only  valid  one.  In  all 
these  calculations  we  have  only  come  up  by 
an  unfrequented  path  to  the  standards  of 
Jesus.  A  man's  worth  can  never  be  measured 
in  physical  materials  or  dollars  or  brains  in 
themselves,  but  in  two  terms  only — character 
and  service. 

We  cannot  measure  temperature  by  the 
pound  or  men  by  things.  Man  is  a  spirit 
created  capable  of  a  divine  fellowship,  and  the 
currency  of  the  Kingdom  to  which  he  belongs 
and  in  which  his  final  value  is  reckoned  is  in 
purposes  and  ideals.  It  is  computed  by  the 
degree  to  which  we  live  up  to  the  injunction 
of  Burns, 

Where'er  you  feel  your  honor  grip 
Let  that  aye  be  your  border. 

It  is  reckoned  by  the  unattained  to  which  we 
reach. 

All  I  aspired  to  be  and  was  not 
Comforts  me.    That  was  I  worth  to  God. 

An  Indian  devotee,  who  added  a  large  iron 
ring  to  his  body  every  year,  as  a  penance, 
finally  weighed  so  much  that  the  railroads 
refused  to  accept  him  as  a  passenger  and 


HOW  MUCH  ARE  YOU  WORTH  ?      79 

shipped  him  as  freight.  There  are  a  great 
many  people,  who  if  they  were  weighed  by 
what  they  carry  inside  of  them  in  the  way  of 
character,  would  go  forward  as  freight. 

Service  is  the  other  test.  Jesus's  parable 
of  the  Last  Judgment  states  the  truth  that 
worth  is  to  be  computed  wholly  in  terms  of 
expenditure.  In  the  world  of  commerce  we 
compute  wealth  in  surplus  and  saving.  In  the 
Kingdom  of  God  it  is  figured  in  things  spent — 
the  amount  of  concrete  helpfulness  and 
genuine  love  we  have  put  into  the  lives  of  our 
brothers. 


XV 

THE  SURPRISE  OF  LIFE 

A  LITERARY  critic  has  told  us  that  there  are 
only  seven  original  stories  in  the  world  and 
that  all  others  are  variations  of  these  seven 
plots.  One  of  the  oldest  and  most  universal 
of  these  seven  stories  is  that  of  the  ugly  duck- 
ling, the  despised  creature  of  the  barnyard, 
which  surprised  all  the  other  fowls  and  itself 
most  of  all  by  turning  into  the  beautiful  swan. 
Cinderella,  the  delight  of  all  young  hearts,  is 
another  form  of  the  same  tale.  It  appears  in 
the  romantic  career  of  Joseph.  It  is  the  tale 
of  the  rejected  stone  which  becomes  the  head 
of  the  corner.  In  a  very  lofty  and  reverent 
sense,  it  is  the  story  of  Him  who  was  despised 
and  rejected  of  men,  but  unto  whom  every 
knee  shall  bow  and  every  tongue  confess. 

We  cherish  the  tale  in  all  forms,  because  it 
does  for  us  a  very  large  service.  It  pictures 
life  in  terms  of  its  surprises.  It  witnesses  to 
the  fact  that  however  humdrum  and  routine 
we  may  allow  it  to  appear,  life  can  never  be 
reduced  to  exact  formulas.     No  matter  how 

80 


THE  SURPRISE  OF  LIFE  81 

scientifically  we  may  think  and  speak  of  causes 
and  consequences,  we  make  but  a  poor  muddle 
of  our  calculations  unless  we  continually 
allow  for  a  variable  "x" — the  surprising  fact 
that  the  race  is  not  always  to  the  swift  nor 
the  battle  to  the  strong.  All  who  have  lived 
long  and  who  have  given  any  thoughtful 
glance  back,  would  agi'ee  that  one  of  the 
strangest  features  of  their  lives  has  been  in 
the  unexpected  part  played  by  its  unnoticed 
fragments  and  lightly  esteemed  remainders. 
Professor  Moore,  of  Columbia  University, 
spent  an  honored  life  as  a  teacher  of  lan- 
guages, doing  work  of  high  scholarly  value. 
One  afternoon,  for  the  amusement  of  some 
children,  he  wrote  some  playful  little  verses 
beginning,  "  'Twas  the  night  before  Christmas, 
and  all  through  the  house."  All  of  his  learned 
linguistic  works  have  been  forgotten,  even 
by  scholars;  but  the  little  verses  have  put  on 
the  bloom  of  immortality.  It  is  only  a  vivid 
illustration  of  the  truth  that  the  thing  most 
worth  remembrance  may  be  what  is  thought  of 
least.  Real  romance  is  preserved  in  every  life 
by  the  constant  possibility  of  surprise.  And 
it  works  mightily  for  our  encouragement  in 
service. 


82  PARES,  PLEASE! 

Unpretentious  things  have  a  surprising  way 
of  counting  for  more  than  our  most  elaborate 
efforts.  How  much  more  is  our  happiness 
governed  by  simple  pleasures,  simple  comforts, 
and  above  all,  simple  goodness,  than  by  our 
abilities  or  our  cleverness !  Men  of  the  finest 
native  talents  are  humbled  again  and  again  by 
seeing  the  much  greater  accomplishment  of 
men  far  their  inferiors  in  ingenuity  and  elo- 
quence. Carlyle  observes,  "How  much  inferior 
for  seeing  with  is  your  brightest  train  of  fire- 
works to  the  humblest  farthing  candle!"  It 
has  been  computed  that  it  would  take  thirty- 
seven  flashes  of  lightning  to  keep  a  common 
incandescent  lamp  burning  for  one  hour.  The 
surprise  of  life  often  comes  in  the  greater 
power  there  is  in  the  steady  glow  of  faithful- 
ness and  kindness  than  in  the  flashes  of  talent 
and  genius.  There  was  irony  in  the  remark 
made  of  a  certain  minister,  that  the  best  pas- 
sage in  his  sermon  was  the  passage  from  the 
pulpit  to  the  vestry.  But  the  finest  passage 
of  even  the  most  eloquent  utterance  is  that 
which  carries  the  truth  out  into  the  intimacies 
of  daily  intercourse. 

Unintended  things  often  become  the  head  of 
the   corner.      Miss    Sullivan,    the   wonderful 


THE  SURPRISE  OF  LIFE  83 

teacher  of  Helen  Keller,  records  this  discovery 
in  a  letter  written  three  weeks  after  beginning 
her  deaf  and  blind  pupil's  education:  "I  am 
Helen's  nurse  as  well  as  teacher.  I  like  to 
have  her  depend  on  me  for  everything,  and  I 
find  it  easier  to  teach  her  things  at  odd  mo- 
ments than  at  set  times."  It  is  a  wise  dis- 
covery worthy  the  remembrance  of  any 
teacher.  We  are  apt  to  consider  as  our  life- 
work  the  things  done  at  set  times  and  then 
stumble  on  to  the  strange  fact  that  the  "odd 
moments"  have  produced  as  much  or  more  in 
fruitful  results.  Life's  best  things  frequently 
come  from  its  interruptions.  The  very  act  of 
setting  about  things  in  a  formal  way,  as 
though  to  say,  "Here  now,  I  am  going  to 
teach  you  something,"  or  "I  am  going  to  do 
you  good,"  often  serves  to  close  the  mind  we 
wish  to  reach;  while  the  unheralded  word 
thrown  off  in  the  course  of  the  day's  work, 
and  hence  real  and  genuine,  carries  conviction. 
Incidental  things  are  a  never-ending  sur- 
prise. We  are  frequently  amazed  at  the  small- 
ness  and  apparent  triviality  of  the  things 
which  people  remember  about  us.  We  do  our 
work,  or  make  our  speeches,  and  are  discon- 
certed to  find  that  we  are  not  recalled  by  our 


84  FARES,  PLEASE! 

main  performances  or  public  efforts  at  all.  A 
lady  in  a  Connecticut  village  told  her  pastor 
that  all  she  remembered  of  a  minister  who 
preached  there  fifty  years  before,  and  who 
since  rendered  distinguished  service  as  a 
bishop  of  the  Methodist  Church,  South,  was 
that  two  little  beads  of  perspiration  always 
formed  on  his  brow  when  he  preached.  Her 
pastor  replied  that  he  would  be  willing  to 
have  every  sermon  of  his  forgotten,  if  the  im- 
pression of  earnestness  and  sincerity  were 
strong  enough  to  span  half  a  century.  We 
work  in  life's  morning  for  its  certainties ;  but 
at  evening  we  shall  doubtless  rejoice  most  in 
its  surprises. 


XVI 

SAFETY  FIRST? 

In  Mr.  St.  John  G.  Ervine's  book  of 
sketches,  Eight  O'clock  and  Other  Studies, 
there  is  an  unforgetable  character  portrait 
of  a  Mr.  Timms,  a  clerk  in  a  large  London 
office.  The  life  of  Mr.  Timms  revolved  con- 
tinually around  the  thought:  Supposing  that 
one  day  he  should  be  unable  to  work,  what 
should  become  of  him?  He  would  awaken  at 
night,  crying  out  in  fear  because  of  some 
horrible  dream  in  which  he  saw  himself  dis- 
missed from  the  service  of  his  employers  for 
one  reason  or  another.  The  same  terror  was 
his  evil  genius  by  day.  So  as  the  years  passed, 
the  despotism  of  this  fear  took  heavy  toll  of 
the  best  possibilities  of  his  life.  Something 
inside  of  him  would  urge  the  quest  of  adven- 
tures. "Do  something  to  show  that  you  are 
alive,"  it  would  say,  and  the  fear  of  endanger- 
ing his  position  by  some  time  yielding  to  one 
of  these  moods  added  another  to  his  many 
terrors.     He  thought  of  marriage,  and  "the 

85 


86  FARES,  PLEASE! 

thing  inside"  kept  saying,  "Risk  it,  man,  risk 
it!"  But  the  thought  of  the  possibility  of 
getting  sick  and  out  of  employment,  with  a 
wife  and  perhaps  a  family  to  support,  drove 
him  back  to  the  dreariness  of  his  dingy  bed- 
sitting  room.  Finally  the  inevitable  comes; 
he  loses  his  position  and  his  savings  rapidly 
dwindle.  Sickness  overtakes  him  and  the 
doctor's  verdict  is  that  he  has  only  a  short 
time  to  live.  The  doctor  is  amazed  at  the 
calm  which  the  announcement  brings.  "Thank 
God,"  said  Mr.  Timms  to  himself,  "I  am  safe 
now."    In  three  months  he  was  dead. 

It  is  a  graphic  and  pathetic  picture  of  the 
frightful  cost  of  the  worship  of  safety. 

The  wide  popularity  of  the  industrial 
slogan  "Safety  First"  has  been  of  immense 
service  in  reducing  the  number  of  preventable 
accidents,  and  has  taken  on  the  proportions 
of  a  national  movement.  In  which  we  all  re- 
joice. But  this  ideal,  so  eminently  fitting  for 
railroad  and  shop  operation,  is  often  trans- 
ferred and  set  up  as  an  ideal  in  a  field  where 
it  can  work  only  havoc — the  world  of  moral 
action. 

Safety  First  is  the  poorest  motto  which 
could  possibly  be  taken  for  life.    We  may  well 


SAFETY  FIRST?  87 

ask  in  these  days  of  slaughter,  "Can  any  good 
come  out  of  Nietzsche?"  But  there  is-  a  fine 
word  in  his  advice,  "Live  dangerously."  He 
explains  it  as  meaning,  "I  will  try  something 
I  have  not  tried  before;  I  will  walk  without 
leading  strings;  I  will  work  in  a  fresh 
medium."  In  the  struggle  between  the 
temptation  to  prefer  ease  and  softness, 
quietude  and  safety,  to  risk,  striving,  daring, 
and  adventure,  the  prize  of  getting  the  most 
out  of  life  as  well  as  keeping  truest  to  the  pur- 
poses of  God  belongs  on  the  side  of  the  daring. 
Shall  my  life  be  ruled  by  small  maxims  or 
by  large  principles?  This  is  the  previous 
question  every  one  must  answer.  The  cult  of 
the  twin  gods  of  Thrift  and  Prudence  has 
always  been  a  numerous  one.  Its  most  in- 
spired scripture  is,  "A  bird  in  the  hand  is 
worth  two  in  the  bush."  It  loves  "practical, 
hard-headed  common  sense."  It  delights  in 
rule  of  thumb  maxims  for  keeping  the  eye  on 
the  "main  chance."  It  is  safe  and  sane.  But 
it  is  so  hopelessly  sane  that  it  overreaches  its 
mark,  and  a  calculating  prudence  has  de- 
stroyed more  souls  than  prodigal  vice.  "Where 
ignorance  is  bliss,  'tis  folly  to  be  wise,"  is 
sometimes  nobly  true,  for,  as  Stevenson  points 


88  FARES,  PLEASE! 

out,  "To  be  overwise  is  to  ossify;  and  the 
scruple-monger  ends  by  standing  stock  still. 
Who,  if  he  were  wisely  considerate  of  things 
at  large,  would  ever  embark  on  any  work  much 
more  considerable  than  a  penny  postcard?" 
Can  any  risk  in  life  be  more  hazardous  than 
that  of  spending  it  making  tame  and  dull  little 
"half -penny  postcards,"  when  it  might  be  made 
a  living  epistle  of  noble  exploits? 

Take  friendship,  for  instance.  How  shall 
we  deal  with  the  alternate  courses  of  risk  and 
safety  and  risk  there?  The  achievement  of  a 
fine  friendship  is  one  of  the  most  worthful 
undertakings  of  life.  But  every  true  friend- 
ship is  a  risk.  It  lays  our  lives  open  to  costly 
liabilities.  So  Prudence  whispers  in  our  ears : 
"Be  not  friendly  overmuch.  Be  pleasant, 
cordial;  cultivate  the  acquaintance  of  people 
who  ^count.'  But  be  careful.  Don't  allow 
your  heart-strings  to  get  such  a  firm  half -hitch 
around  another  person  that  you  can't  let  go 
while  you  are  on  the  safe  side  of  trouble.  If 
you  get  in  too  deep,  it  is  liable  to  cost  you 
discomfort  and  money,  and  perhaps  hurt  your 
reputation."  This  is  the  siren  voice  which 
many  follow  to  the  barren  rocks  of  selfishness. 
So  they  are  safe — they  avoid  the  risks,  and 


SAFETY  FIRST?  89 

miss  the  finest  joy  life  has  to  offer — the  gener- 
ous and  unealculating  thrill  of  a  loving  heart. 
Then  they  wonder,  very  often,  why  life  grows 
flat  and  stale.  So  by  staying  indoors  we  can 
avoid  the  risk  of  catching  cold;  but  we  will 
also  miss  the  glory  of  the  sunrise,  the  swing  of 
the  cloud  in  the  midsummer  sky,  the  subtile 
witchery  of  the  twilight — ^in  a  word,  life. 

The  service  of  Christ  is  a  large  risk.  When 
anyone  gives  himself  sincerely  to  a  real  bit  of 
work  in  the  church  or  Kingdom,  he  verily 
takes  up  a  cross.  It  will  surely  cost  money 
and  toil.  The  chances  are  it  will  also  mean 
misunderstanding,  misrepresentation,  and 
friction.  Seeing  only  what  is  near,  men  side- 
step the  task.  On  the  altar  of  Safety,  the 
privilege  of  being  a  colaborer  with  God  is 
ruthlessly  sacrificed.  Is  it  worth  it?  In 
every  field — in  politics,  in  social  service — 
the  same  interplay  of  risk  and  safety  is  seen. 
In  every  one  is  the  brave  entry  made  in  the 
journal  of  the  first  minister  in  New  England 
on  the  voyage  across  the  Atlantic,  eternally 
true — "Those  that  love  their  owne  chimney 
corner  and  dare  not  fare  beyond  their  owne 
towne's  end,  shall  never  have  the  honor  to  see 
the  wonderful  workes  of  God." 


XVII 

WHAT  DO  YOU  EXPECT  YOUR  CHURCH 
TO  DO  FOR  YOU? 

This  question  makes  a  large  assumption 
which  is  not  always  justified  by  any  means. 
Many  expect  nothing  of  their  church.  They 
bring  to  it  no  earnest  expectation  of  its  doing 
anything  definite,  and  they  get  just  about 
what  they  bring — nothing.  Tennyson^s 
"Northern  Farmer"  had  a  blurred  experience 
at  church  which  is  a  common  one: 

An'  I  never  knowed  what  he  meaned,  but  I  thowt  he  'ad 

summat  to  say. 
An'  I  thowt  he  said  whot  he  owt  to  'a  said,  an'  I  coom'd 

awaay. 

It  is  significant  that  on  several  occasions  when 
Jesus  did  any  works  of  healing  he  deemed  it 
important  to  have  a  clear  answer  to  the  ques- 
tion, "What  wilt  thou  have  me  to  do?"  The 
extent  and  clearness  of  expectation  often 
determines  the  extent  and  concreteness  of 
benefit. 

There  are  some  things  which  we  have  no 
90 


WHAT  DO  YOU  EXPECT?  91 

right  to  expect  our  church  to  do  for  us.  It 
cannot  save  us.  This  is  an  obvious  truth,  but 
we  should  not  forget  that  it  has  not  always 
been  so,  nor  is  it  to-day  to  multitudes  of  Chris- 
tians. With  a  great  price  has  this  freedom 
been  obtained  for  us.  Nor  can  the  church 
automatically  improve  us.  This  is  not  so 
clearly  held  in  mind.  It  is  easy  to  slip  into 
the  unconscious  feeling  that  church-going 
works  some  kind  of  an  automatic  charm.  We 
live  in  an  age  when  so  much  is  done  for  us 
by  clever  mechanical  contrivances.  Edison 
says  the  future  is  to  be  an  age  of  buttons — 
simply  press  on  the  right  button  and  dismiss 
the  matter  from  your  mind.  We  can  cook 
breakfast  in  bed  to  music  from  the  automatic 
piano.  We  do  our  housework  with  vacuum 
cleaners  and  electric  irons,  while  the  fireless 
cooker  is  getting  dinner.  All  of  which  in- 
creases the  temptation  to  think  of  spiritual 
things  in  automatic  terms. 

If  we  will  swiftly  glance  at  what  their  con- 
tact with  Jesus  brought  to  three  widely  differ- 
ent men,  we  will  discover  three  things  which 
are  permanent  elements  of  what  we  ought  to 
expect  of  our  church. 

The  first  is  the  Blind  Man.    His  answer  to 


92  FARES,  PLEASE! 

Jesus's  question,  "What  wilt  thou  have  me  to 
do?"  was  a  definite  one — "Lord,  that  I  may 
receive  my  sight."  We  have  a  right  to  expect 
vision.  There  was  organized  a  few  years  ago 
among  people  aroused  by  the  miseries  of  pre- 
ventable blindness,  a  society  with  a  name  as 
noble  as  its  purpose — "The  Society  for  the 
Conservation  of  Vision."  That  is  just  what 
the  Christian  Church  is.  It  exists  to  wipe 
out  the  misery  caused  by  preventable  moral 
and  spiritual  blindness,  and  more  particu- 
larly, to  prevent  it.  If  the  wires  are  the  sensi- 
tive nerves  of  a  city,  the  parks  its  lungs,  and 
the  railroads  its  gigantic  arms,  its  <ihurches 
are  its  eyes,  its  watchtowers  and  hills  of 
vision,  which  pierce  through  the  smoke  and 
grime  and  the  fog  of  bewilderment  to  the 
Eternal.  As  a  workman  complained  recently, 
"We  work  all  day  to  make  money  and  half 
the  night  to  spend  it;  what  we  need  is  some 
one  to  tell  us  what  it  is  all  about." 

But  "vision"  is  an  abstract  and  rather 
vague  word.  Schools,  homes,  and  political 
institutions  give  vision.  Expectation  must  be 
focused  more  closely.  Three  Greeks  went  to 
church  one  day  in  Jerusalem  with  a  definite 
expectation  which  was  met — "Sir,  we  would 


WHAT  DO  YOU  EXPECT?  93 

see  Jesus."  That  is  still  the  supreme  thing 
our  church  should  do  for  us.  When  we  get  a 
real  vision  of  Him  who  above  all  others  saw 
life  steadily  and  saw  it  whole,  we  are  able  to 
take  up  its  tangled  threads  and  weave  anew. 

The  second  man  is  Peter.  His  contact  with 
Jesus  evoked  a  strange  cry — "Depart  from  me, 
for  I  am  a  sinful  man."  That  same  contact 
should  bring  to  us  continually  rebuke.  We 
do  not  like  rebuke.  It  is  much  more  pleasant 
to  hear  smooth  sayings.  It  is  a  common 
remark  to  hear,  "I  go  to  church  to  be  com- 
forted." And  a  right  thing.  But  if  we  are 
always  comforted  at  church,  if  we  always 
enjoy  the  sermon,  something  is  radically 
wrong.  The  sword  of  Christ  which  would 
destroy  our  superficial  peace  and  shallow  con- 
tent has  never  left  the  scabbard.  It  was  a  fine 
compliment  that  Louis  XIV  paid  to  Massil- 
lon:  "I  have  heard  several  great  orators  and 
have  been  much  pleased  with  them;  as  for 
every  time  I  hear  you,  I  am  much  displeased 
with  myself."  Before  Christ  can  touch  the 
deepest  level  in  man  the  man  must  be  made 
thoroughly  uncomfortable  and  discontented. 
When  we  cease  measuring  ourselves  by  the 
petty  standards  of  our  neighbors  or  our  own 


94  PARES,  PLEASE! 

mean  achievements,  and  really  see  Jesus,  we 
feel  the  keen  edge  of  a  spiritual  hunger. 

The  third  man  is  Matthew,  Contact  with 
Christ  for  him  meant  inspiration  and  immedi- 
ate action.  "He  arose  and  followed  him."  If 
we  come  ready  to  receive  and  cherish  those 
high  words  of  Jesus — ^his  great  imperatives, 
"Come,"  "Be,"  "Do,"  "Go"— we  shall  never 
find  him  to  fail  us.  He  brings  the  freshness  of 
the  heroic.  Men  are  won  not  by  premises  or 
even  by  conclusions.  They  respond  to  the 
trumpet  tones.  A  young  soldier  on  a  hospital 
cot  pleaded  with  the  doctor,  "O,  don't  say  I'm 
not  fit  for  duty.  It's  only  a  touch  of  fever,  and 
the  sound  of  the  bugle  will  make  me  well." 
The  church  which  speaks  the  word  of  her  Mas- 
ter always  brings  the  medicine  of  the  bugle. 


XVIII 

WHAT  DOES  YOUR  CHURCH  EXPECT 
OF  YOU? 

It  is  a  sad  but  common  mistake  to  imagine 
that  we  ever  add  to  the  permanent  attractive- 
ness of  the  church  by  minimizing  or  slurring 
over  its  costly  demands  and  expectations.  It 
is  true,  of  course,  that  a  church  should  be  the 
most  attractive  place  in  any  community.  All 
that  can  be  brought  to  it  of  fellowship,  music, 
and  inspiration,  should  be  there  as  the  fine 
gold  of  the  sanctuary,  adorning  the  doctrine 
of  God.  But  it  is  a  great  blunder  to  think  we 
ever  make  the  church  attractive  by  hiding  the 
truth  that  at  its  center  is  not  a  flower  garden 
but  a  cross.  No  one  ever  desired  so  passion- 
ately to  win  adherents  as  did  Jesus,  and  yet 
he  seemed  to  fear  nothing  so  much  as  that 
people  would  get  the  impression  that  he  was 
asking  them  to  go  on  a  picnic,  a  sort  of  rollick- 
ing pleasure  trip  down  to  Jerusalem,  where 
the  great  rewards  would  be  distributed.  He 
could  do  more  with  twelve  men  who  joined 

95 


96  FARES,  PLEASE! 

him  with  a  real  sense  of  his  conditions  than 
with  five  thousand  who  would  make  him  King 
because  they  had  enjoyed  a  free  dinner.  There 
is  keen  truth  in  the  satire  of  Sam  Jones  that 
the  saying  of  Jesus,  "If  any  man  will  come 
after  me,  let  him  deny  himself,  and  take  up 
his  cross  and  follow  me,"  is  frequently  inter- 
preted as  though  it  meant,  "If  any  man  will 
come  after  me,  let  him  enjoy  himself,  and  take 
up  his  ice-cream  freezer  and  follow  me." 

Your  church  expects  you  to  believe  in  it. 
Which  is  a  very  different  thing  from  patroniz- 
ing it,  or  giving  it  your  cordial  good  wishes, 
or  even  filling  up  your  Duplex  envelope  every 
Sunday.  It  means  to  believe  that  it  has  a 
mission  in  nourishing  men's  lives  that  nothing 
else  can  possibly  replace.  It  expects  you  to 
believe  in  it  as  the  architect  believes  in  the 
steel  frame  of  his  skyscraper,  or  the  engineer 
believes  in  the  girders  of  his  bridge ;  or,  to  take 
a  far  more  suitable  figure,  as  the  farmer  be- 
lieves in  rain.  He  may  get  along  without 
paint  on  his  barns;  he  may  manage  without 
a  self-binder  or  a  steam  plow ;  but  he  does  need 
commerce  with  the  sky  in  the  form  of  rain.  So 
the  conviction  that  the  soul  of  man  needs  the 
life  of  God  must  be  equally  regnant. 


WHAT  DOES  CHURCH  EXPECT?    97 

Religion's  all  or  nothing;  it's  no  mere  smile 

Of  contentment,  sigh  of  aspiration,  sir, 

No  quality  of  the  finely  tempered  clay 

Like  its  whiteness  or  its  lightness;  rather  stuff 

Of  the  very  stuff;  life  of  life,  and  self  of  self. 


It  is  true  that  the  groves  were  God's  first 
temples  and  that  man  can  worship  his  Maker 
anywhere.  But  it  is  also  true  that  the  man 
who  will  worship  everywhere  is  the  man  who 
has  learned  to  worship  somewhere,  "Look  out 
for  that  man,"  some  one  said  of  young  Robes- 
pierre. "He's  dangerous.  He  believes  what 
he  says."  Your  church  expects  "dangerous" 
believers. 

It  expects  you  to  prove  it.  That  is  not  to 
write  a  book  of  apologetics.  The  fundamental 
demand  of  the  church  on  each  one  of  us  is  not 
this  detailed  piece  of  service  or  that,  however 
important  it  may  be,  but  to  prove  its  authority 
by  our  exposition  of  the  kind  of  life  it  can 
create.  We  are  expected  to  be  living  proofs 
of  the  ability  of  the  gospel  through  the  church 
to  create  character.  We  frequently  hear 
people  speak  of  doing  church  work  and  find 
that  they  refer  to  baking  pies  and  sewing 
quilts,  work  that  is  not  distinctly  religious  at 
all.    "Men  will  wrangle  for  religion,  work  for 


98  FARES,  PLEASE! 

it,  write  for  it,  fight  for  it,  die  for  it,  do  every- 
thing but  live  for  it."  The  primary  religious 
work  is  to  live  in  the  power  of  the  Christian 
evangel. 

Your  church  expects  you  to  project  it.  Arch- 
bishop Whately  was  still  the  logician  when 
he  said,  "Either  give  up  your  religion  or 
propagate  it."  There  is  no  middle  course. 
The  last  paragraph  of  every  effective  sermon 
must  always  be  made  up  of  actions  on  the  part 
of  the  congregation.  Our  church  has  a  right 
to  expect  its  impulse  to  travel  down  to  our 
feet  and  make  of  us  "souls  in  motion."  In 
1864,  when  Lee's  army  had  entered  Pennsyl- 
vania, a  citizen  of  Philadelphia  telegraphed 
General  Halleck  at  Washington  to  know  if  he 
could  be  of  any  service  in  that  vicinity.  He 
received  this  grim  reply :  "We  have  five  times 
as  many  generals  as  we  want,  but  we  are 
greatly  in  need  of  privates.  Any  one  volun- 
teering in  that  capacity  will  be  thankfully  re- 
ceived." 

"Greatly  in  need  of  privates!"  Plenty  of 
volunteers  for  the  seats  of  the  mighty,  but  the 
earnest  expectation  of  the  church  waiteth  for 
the  appearance  of  its  "private  projectors." 


XIX 

THE  HIGHEST  HEREDITY 

The  phrase  belongs  to  that  maker  of  splen- 
did phrases,  David  Starr  Jordan.  The  most 
determining  factor  in  every  man's  inheritance 
is  not  that  which  he  gets  from  his  grandfather 
but  what  he  gets  from  himself.  Every  man  is 
his  own  most  important  ancestor. 

The  nineteenth  century  gave  us  two  dra- 
matic literary  pictures  of  heredity  in  striking 
contrast.  One  of  them  was  Ibsen's  Ghosts. 
It  is  a  play  full  of  characteristic  Scandinavian 
gloom,  showing  the  progress  to  tragic  climaxes 
of  a  group  of  people  under  the  relentless  auto- 
matic control  of  the  spent  passions  of  their 
ancestors.  It  is  full  of  a  morbid  fatalism, 
depicting  a  world  where  men  move  under  the 
hopeless  control  of  a  dead  hand.  Its  philoso- 
phy chains  up  human  freedom  in  the  meshes 
of  an  iron  necessity  more  binding  than  the 
most  rigid  kind  of  foreordination  ever  con- 
ceived. 

Mary  Wollstonecraf  t  Shelley  pictures  a  very 
99 


100  FARES,  PLEASE! 

different  kind  of  force,  still  terrible,  still  un- 
escapable,  but  with  a  very  different  kind  of 
source.  Her  Frankenstein  tells  the  story  of 
a  student  who  constructed  out  of  the  frag- 
ments of  bodies  picked  from  churchyards  and 
dissecting  rooms  a  human  form  without  a  soul. 
The  monster  had  muscular  strength,  animal 
passions,  and  an  active  life,  but  no  "breath  of 
divinity."  It  longed  for  animal  love  and  sym- 
pathy but  was  shunned  by  all.  For  a  time  it 
followed  obediently  the  dictates  of  its  master, 
but  gradually  got  away  from  his  control,  till 
finally,  so  far  from  being  his  servant,  it  be- 
comes his  ruler.  It  was  most  powerful  for 
evil,  and  being  fully  conscious  of  its  own  de- 
fects and  deformities,  sought  with  persistency 
to  inflict  retribution  on  the  young  student  who 
had  called  it  into  being. 

Mrs.  Shelley  did  not  write  Frankenstein 
primarily  as  an  allegory  but  as  a  wild  and 
powerful  romance.  It  is  all  the  more  effective 
as  a  work  of  art  in  that  it  draws  no  lessons. 
The  tragic  movement  of  the  tale  is  a  living 
representation  of  the  way  a  man's  days  and 
years  gradually  build  up  within  a  force  of 
character  whose  movements  he  finally  does  not 
direct  but  obey.    Christ's  last  words  to  Peter, 


THE  HIGHEST  fiMEDIti'  '  ^  lOl 

as  recorded  by  John,  have  a  startling,  though 
wholly  unintended  application  to  the  realm  of 
character-building  through  habit  formation: 
"When  thou  wast  young,  thou  girdedst  thyself 
and  walkedst  whither  thou  wouldest ;  but  when 
thou  shalt  be  old,  thou  shalt  stretch  forth  thy 
hands  and  another  shall  gird  thee  and  carry 
thee  whither  thou  wouldest  not."  The  "other" 
who  finally  girds  and  carries  us  is  the  un- 
conscious force  which  our  yesterdays  have 
created  and  placed  on  the  throne. 

,The  heredity  we  receive  from  others  is  never 
to  be  lightly  regarded.  The  twentieth  century 
is  young,  barely  entered  on  its  adolescence,  yet 
it  has  already  added  distinctly  to  our  knowl- 
edge and  appreciation  of  the  importance  and 
laws  of  heredity.  The  whole  new  science  of 
eugenics  has  been  marked  out  and  pretty  well 
staked  off  in  fifteen  years.  The  future  will 
give  not  less  but  more  importance  to  the 
problems  of  heredity  than  ever  before.  But 
no  possible  advance  in  our  knowledge  of  an- 
cestral heredity  will  ever  subtract  from  the 
truth  that  it  is  from  ourselves  that  we  receive 
the  most  determining  inheritance.  The  classic 
pictures  of  "The  Three  Fates,"  blindly  spin- 
ning and  cutting  the  thread  of  life,  is  an 


%j^^i>H}  FAKES',  PLEASE ! 

anachronism.  We  handle  the  shears  for  our- 
selves. The  man  of  forty  is  under  the  "grip 
of  a  dead  hand,"  but  it  is  not  so  much  that 
of  his  father  as  that  of  the  boy  of  fifteen  or 
twenty  that  he  used  to  be.  It  is  "the  vanished 
yesterdays"  which  are  the  tyrants  of  to-mor- 
row. Ruskin  declares,  with  a  fine  appre- 
ciation of  this  truth,  that  he  had  rather 
hear  people  speak  of  thoughtless  old  age,  than 
indulgently  excuse  "the  thoughtlessness  of 
youth."  "Youth  thoughtless,  when  the  career 
of  all  his  days  depends  on  the  chances  or 
passions  of  an  hour  or  the  opportunities  of 
a  moment!  A  youth  thoughtless,  when  his 
every  act  is  as  a  torch  to  the  laid  train  of 
future  conduct,  and  every  imagination  a  foun- 
tain of  life  and  death!  Be  thoughtless  in 
future  years  rather  than  now,  though,  indeed, 
there  is  only  one  place  where  a  man  may  be 
nobly  thoughtless — his  deathbed." 

There  is  only  one  real  ghost  who  will  ever 
haunt  us.  It  is  the  vision  of  the  man  we  might 
have  been.  In  our  brightest  success  and  most 
abject  failure  he  will  be  there,  with  a  sad  and 
wistful  glance.  The  action  of  to-day,  so  appar- 
ently insignificant  in  itself,  is  determining 
whether  we  will  leave  to  the  man  we  will  be 


THE  HIGHEST  HEREDITY         103 

to-morrow  the  fine  inheritance  of  a  mind  un- 
spoiled by  dissipation,  trained  to  think  and 
act,  or  whether  we  will  throw  away  his  inherit- 
ance before  he  has  had  a  chance  to  touch  it. 

"The  highest  heredity"  is,  at  bottom,  a  great 
message  of  hope.  To  think  that  the  limits  of 
possibility  are  finally  set  at  birth  makes  for 
inertia,  irresponsibility,  and  despair.  But  to 
know  that  to-day  we  are  creating  our  own 
to-morrow  is  a  sobering  and  ennobling  inspira- 
tion. 

One  ship  goes  east,  another  west. 

By  the  selfsame  winds  that  blow; 
'Tis  the  set  of  the  sail,  and  not  the  gale, 

That  determines  the  way  they  go. 

Never  should  this  subject  be  left,  however, 
without  the  remembrance  that  in  addition  to 
being  the  heirs  of  all  the  ages  and  of  ourselves, 
we  are  "joint  heirs  with  Jesus  Christ."  We 
are  not  left  to  work  out  our  own  salvation  as  a 
lonely  tour-de-force ^  for  it  is  God  which 
worketh  in  us  to  will  and  to  do  of  his  good 
pleasure. 


XX 


CARRIED   OVER   FROM    CHILDHOOD- 
LIABILITIES 

The  glory  of  Christianity  lies  in  the  things 
it  carries  over  from  childhood.  The  fellow- 
ship of  real  Christians  who  have  entered  the 
Kingdom  as  little  children  and  have  kept  those 
traits  is  the  most  youthful  place  in  the  world, 
as  it  is  certainly  the  most  glorious. 

But  not  all  the  remainders  of  childhood  are 
on  the  credit  side.  Some  are  distinct  liabili- 
ties, over  which  a  watchful  eye  must  be  kept. 
In  the  church  we  are  sure  to  find  some  of  the 
qualities  of  childhood,  which,  above  all  things 
else,  called  forth  Jesus's  most  enthusiastic 
praise.  In  the  church  as  well,  however,  we 
are  unfortunately  apt  to  find  some  things 
carried  over  from  childhood  which  are  large 
subtractions  from  its  possible  power.  Three 
phrases,  which  are  a  part  of  the  memory  of 
everyone,  perhaps  represent  better  than  any- 
thing else  some  attitudes  which  are  responsible 
for  big  loss. 

104 


CARKIED  OVER  LIABILITIES     105 

1.  ^^Now  I  lay  me  down  to  sleep/'  Pity  the 
man  to  whom  these  unforgetable  words  do 
not  embody  the  most  sacred  memories  of  life ! 
They  are  universally  freighted  with  the  most 
tender  associations,  and  it  would  be  a  ruth- 
less hand  which  should  seek  to  pluck  them 
out  of  their  place.  But  aside  from  their  tender 
memories,  these  childhood  words  may  well 
stand  for  a  soporific  attitude  and  intent  all 
too  common  in  the  life  of  the  church.  It  is  all 
too  common  for  men  to  leave  behind  that  alert 
and  vigilant  wakefulness  which  characterizes 
them  in  their  business  life — the  qui  vive  so 
necessary  there — when  they  enter  the  worship 
and  service  of  the  church,  and  instead  of  sum- 
moning all  their  faculties  together,  they  lay 
themselves  down  to  slumber  on  a  child's  crib. 
Too  many  of  our  prayers  begin,  "Now  I  lay 
me  down  to  sleep."  A  man's-size  prayer  runs 
more  like  this : 

Now  I  get  me  up  to  wake, 

I  pray  the  Lord  my  soul  to  shake. 

"Why,''  exclaims  Sydney  Smith,  "should  we 
call  in  paralysis  to  the  aid  of  piety?''  A  young 
minister  from  the  West  coming  to  a  small  New 
England  parish,  noticed  on  his  first  Sunday 


106  FAKES,  PLEASE! 

that  instead  of  the  bell  being  rung  in  the  man- 
ner to  which  he  had  been  accustomed,  it  was 
tolled  as  for  a  funeral.  He  wondered  who  was 
dead,  and  at  church  time  he  found  out.  They 
were  all  dead.  The  deacons  crept  up  the  aisles 
like  polar  bears.  The  singing  was  what  one 
would  expect  from  Mrs.  Jarley's  wax  works. 
The  Sunday  school  was  a  fine  demonstration 
of  somnambulism.  Very  often  the  grand  old 
words  of  the  hymn  bring  to  us  quite  a  different 
sense  than  the  one  intended : 

On  the  Rock  of  Ages  founded. 
What  can  shake  thy  sure  repose? 

There  is  a  provision  in  the  Mosaic  law 
against  offering  to  the  Lord  a  deformed  ram 
or  a  sick  ewe.  Shall  we  offer  to  him  any  bet- 
ter, our  hours  of  drowsiness,  and  reserve  the 
wide-awake  ones  for  the  Board  of  Trade?  By 
all  means  remember  the  evening  prayer  of 
childhood,  but  keep  even  a  little  clearer  the 
ringing  words  of  Isaiah,  "Awake !  Awake !  O 
Zion!  Put  on  thy  strength!  Shake  thyself 
from  the  dust!'' 

2.  ^^You  in  your  little  corner  and  I  in  mine/^ 
The  words  suggest  the  little  reed  organ  in  the 
primary  room  and  the  eager  chorus  of  youthful 


CARKIED  OVER  LIABILITIES     107 

voices.  Happy  the  church  to  which  they  sug- 
gest nothing  else !  Sometimes  they  inevitably 
suggest  something  by  no  means  so  inspiring — 
a  lack  of  real  cooperation  between  members 
and  societies,  so  that  whatever  prosecution  of 
the  work  there  is  is  a  case  of  you  in  your 
"little  corner  and  I  in  mine."  It  may  be  a  case 
of  too  many  Caesars  who  care  more  about  being 
first  in  the  little  Alpine  village  of  some  par- 
ticular branch  of  work  than  second  or  third  in 
the  larger  Rome.  It  may  be  simply  the  lack 
of  a  common  vision  which  results  in  the  differ- 
ent organizations  of  the  church  moving  like 
a  group  of  camp  followers,  instead  of  march- 
ing with  the  orderly  swing  of  an  army.  With- 
out the  thought  of  the  larger  whole  they  fre- 
quently duplicate,  compete,  and  tread  on  one 
another's  toes  and  even  work  at  cross  pur- 
poses. The  result  is  a  sad  loss  of  energy  and 
momentum.  One  of  Kipling's  finest  stories 
is  that  of  "the  ship  that  found  herself."  In 
it  he  puts  what  is  his  one  great  message — the 
victory  of  discipline  and  organization  over 
individualism  and  anarchy.  The  ship  is  mak- 
ing her  first  voyage  and  the  different  parts 
assert  themselves  in  clamorous  voices,  each 
claiming  its  right  to  pull  its  own  way  and 


108  FARES,  PLEASE! 

complaining  of  the  other  parts.  Finally  a  new 
voice  speaks,  which  none  of  the  parts  recog- 
nize. It  is  the  voice  of  the  ship  herself,  the 
larger  whole  to  which  the  parts  belong.  As 
they  listen  to  that  voice  and  own  its  authority 
harmony  comes  out  of  the  confusion  and  the 
ship  "finds  herself."  In  the  epistles  of  the 
New  Testament  we  find  the  story  of  a  church 
that  found  herself,  "the  unity  of  the  Spirit  in 
the  bond  of  peace."  As  a  church  draws  out 
from  their  isolated  corners  its  various  forces 
to  the  center  of  a  common  related  purpose  it 
forms  for  conquest. 

3.  ^^Ene,  mene^  mine,  mo/'  Who  does  not 
remember  the  childish  incantation  of  our 
games?  It  meant  absolutely  nothing  to  us. 
We  knew  nothing  of  its  origin  or  purpose.  Yet 
its  rhythmic  recitation  gave  us  an  undeniable 
satisfaction.  It  stands  for  the  traditional 
repetition  of  ideas  we  have  not  possessed,  or 
acts  whose  usefulness  we  have  not  investi- 
gated. A  father  asked  his  little  boy  recently 
what  he  had  learned  at  school  that  day.  He 
answered,  "Gesind."  On  his  father's  mystifica- 
tion, he  explained  it.  "Two  gesind  four  twice ; 
two  gesind  six  three  times;  two  gesind  eight 
four  times."    That  was  all — "gesind" — words 


CARRIED  OVER  LIABILITIES     109 

without  meaning,  whose  significance  he  had 
never  possessed  at  alL  Yet  it  is  not  uncom- 
mon, in  much  the  same  manner,  to  let  the  pub- 
lic preaching  of  the  truth  become  a  substitute 
for  its  possession  by  personal  appropriation 
in  our  own  lives.  Often,  too,  our  service  is 
determined  by  what  has  been  rather  than  what 
ought  to  be,  decided  by  a  fresh  facing  of  our 
situation  in  an  unconventional  way.  Doug- 
lass Jerrold  said,  "Some  men  can  never  relish 
a  full  moon,  out  of  respect  for  that  venerable 
institution,  the  old  one." 

"When  I  became  a  man  I  put  away  childish 
things.'' 


XXI 

"THE  WILL" 

In  his  powerful  and  poignant  little  half- 
hour  play  entitled  The  Will,  James  M.  Barrie 
has  traced  the  growth  of  that  strange  and 
fatal  sickness  of  the  soul  called  Greed.  The 
whole  action  takes  place  in  a  London  solici- 
tor's office  to  which  a  man  comes  three  times, 
at  intervals  separated  by  about  twenty  years, 
for  the  purpose  of  making  his  will.  The  cen- 
tral character,  Philip  Ross,  a  young  office 
clerk,  possessed  of  a  small  legacy,  is  accom- 
panied by  his  youthful  and  loving  bride.  She 
is  weeping  hysterically  at  the  mere  suggestion 
of  an  instrument  so  grisly  and  harrowing  as 
a  will.  Her  husband  wishes  to  make  the  will 
in  a  single  sentence  leaving  everything  of 
which  he  dies  possessed  to  his  wife.  She  lov- 
ingly protests  at  being  the  sole  beneficiary,  and 
after  much  wrangling  carries  the  point  of 
having  two  of  her  husband's  cousins  provided 
with  a  hundred  pounds  a  year  out  of  the  estate, 
and  also  of  leaving  one  hundred  pounds  to  a 

110 


"THE  WILL"  111 

convalescent  home.  The  lawyer  is  amused  but 
touched  as  well.  "You  are  a  ridiculous 
couple,"  he  tells  them,  "but  don't  change,  espe- 
cially if  you  get  on  in  the  world."  "No  fear," 
is  the  light-hearted  answer  from  both. 

Twenty  years  later  they  are  in  the  same 
room  again  for  the  same  purpose,  to  make  a 
new  will  disposing  of  an  estate  of  seventy 
thousand  pounds.  Philip  Ross  is  now  one  of 
the  rising  merchants  of  London.  His  wife,  a 
woman  of  forty,  sure  of  herself,  not  so  much 
dressed,  says  Barrie,  as  "richly  upholstered," 
has  come  on  her  own  initiative  to  see  that  her 
husband  does  "nothing  foolish."  There  is  a 
hot- worded  war  over  the  husband's  determina- 
tion to  leave  his  wife  a  life  interest  in  the 
estate  instead  of  outright  possession.  Each 
refers  to  it  as  "my  money."  The  old  tender 
solicitude  which  the  lawyer  had  found  at  once 
so  ridiculous  and  charming  is  gone.  "One 
would  think  you  were  afraid  of  my  marrying 
again,"  she  reproaches  him.  "One  would  think 
you  were  looking  for  my  dying,"  he  angrily 
retorts.  The  allowance  to  the  elderly  cousins 
in  poverty  is  at  her  instance  reduced  from  one 
hundred  to  fifty  pounds.  She  objects  to  his 
leaving  a  thousand  pounds  to  a  hospital  as 


112  FARES,  PLEASE! 

unnecessary,  but  he  clings  to  a  bequest  of  five 
hundred  pounds,  because  he  wants  to  make  a 
"splash  in  hospitals." 

On  the  last  visit  Sir  Philip  Eoss,  now 
knighted,  comes  alone.  His  wife  is  dead  and 
he  comes  to  cancel  all  previous  wills,  especially 
for  the  purpose  of  cutting  off  without  a  penny 
his  two  children.  The  son  has  proved  a 
"rotter,"  to  use  the  father's  own  term,  and  the 
daughter  has  run  away  and  married  against 
his  wishes.  He  starts  to  dictate  to  the  lawyer. 
"I  leave  it — leave  it — my  God !  I  don't  know 
what  to  do  with  it."  Then  in  a  fit  of  swelling 
anger  he  shouts  to  the  lawyer,  "Here  are  the 
names  of  the  half  dozen  men  I've  fought  with 
most  for  gold,  and  I've  beaten  them.  Draw 
up  my  will  leaving  all  my  money  to  be  divided 
among  them,  with  my  respectful  curses,  and 
I'll  sign  it." 

One  of  the  minor  characters  in  the  first 
scene  is  an  old  clerk  in  the  office,  who  has  just 
been  told  by  his  physician  that  he  has  an  in- 
curable cancer.  He  repeats  to  his  employer 
the  doctor's  comment  about  it.  "There  is  a 
spot  of  that  kind  in  pretty  near  all  of  us,  and 
if  we  don't  look  out  it  does  for  us  in  the  end. 
He  calls  it  the  accursed  thing,  and  I  think  he 


"THE  WILL"  113 

meant  we  should  know  of  it  and  be  on  the 
watch."  This  reference  to  a  cancer  spot 
Barrie  uses  most  effectively  at  the  end  of  the 
story  as  a  fine  and  delicate  symbolism  for 
Greed. 

Barrie  did  not  write  this  searching  parable 
fot*  millionaires.  They  face,  no  doubt  in 
complicated  and  excessive  form,  a  peril  of 
riches  that  Jesus  ever  pointed  out.  It  is  a 
sickness  of  the  soul  whose  risk  of  infection  we 
cannot  avoid  by  the  simple  means  of  failing 
to  amass  wealth ;  it  is  one  of  the  common  ills 
whose  risk  all  flesh  is  heir  to. 

We  are  amazed,  when  we  look  into  it,  at  the 
number  of  the  words  of  Jesus  which  deal  with 
the  getting  and  spending  of  wealth.  They 
form  so  large  a  part  of  the  body  of  his  teach- 
ing as  almost  to  suggest  a  lack  of  a  proper 
sense  of  proportion  in  the  writers  of  the  Gos- 
pels. But  nothing  else  stands  as  clearer  evi- 
dence that  he  knew  what  was  in  man. 

One  of  the  great  pictures  on  the  walls  of 
the  Boston  Public  Library  is  Abbey's  rich  and 
colorful  painting  of  Sir  Galahad's  fight  with 
the  Seven  Deadly  Sins.  Murder,  lust,  intem- 
perance, and  the  flagrant  passions  of  the  flesh 
in  their  onslaught  against  the  soul,  are  nobly 


114  FARES,  PLEASE! 

delineated.  But  the  picture  of  the  deadly  sins 
as  Jesus  draws  it  in  the  Gospels  is  a  very  dif- 
ferent one.  To  him  the  deadliest  sins  were 
those  of  the  disposition,  the  cold  hardness  of 
greed,  unteachable  pride,  and  selfish  un- 
brotherliness.  These  sins  are  more  incurable 
because  they  are  less  easily  discovered.  Any 
man  knows  when  he  has  been  drunk,  but  who 
is  able  to  place  his  finger  on  the  moment  when 
the  miasma  of  covetousness  touches  him?  The 
sins  of  the  mind  and  disposition  wreck  the 
very  means  by  which  guilt  can  be 'determined. 
The  light,  which  should  show  the  darkness, 
becomes  darkness  itself. 

A  writer  in  Harper's  Weekly  in  commenting 
on  Barriers  play  said  if  only  a  man  would 
arise  who  could  make  Barrie's  preachment 
effective  and  really  rid  our  lives  of  greed,  he 
would  be  the  great  liberator  whom  all  the 
world  waits  to  acclaim. 

Why  wait? 

"Philip  findeth  Nathanael  and  saith  unto 
him.  We  have  found  him."  The  Messiah  is 
here,  the  liberator  from  greed,  who  can  train 
us  to  overcome  evil  with  the  positive  good  of 
a  life  which  radiates  from  a  living  center  of 
love. 


XXII       . 
"DUTCH  COURAGE" 

All  the  explosions  in  the  great  world  war 
have  been  of  shrapnel  or  torpedoes.  Hoary 
ideas  have  gone  up  with  a  bang.  The  explo- 
sion of  many  of  the  time-honored  delusions 
must  be  set  down  to  the  credit  side  of  the  stag- 
gering tragedy  which  has  made  the  month  of 
August,  1914,  forever  memorable.  The  elo- 
quent argument  of  the  sufficiency  of  commerce 
as  an  insurance  of  world  peace  will  never 
again  impose  on  the  childlike  credulity  of 
millions  of  people.  It  has  been  blasted  into  a 
million  fragments.  Nor  will  the  world  ever 
rest  its  hope  in  the  progress  of  "culture"  as 
a  guarantee  of  humanity.  Like  Humpty 
Dumpty  it  has  fallen  never  to  rise  again. 

Not  least  among  these  happy  explosions  has 
been  the  passing  of  the  tradition  of  alcohol 
as  an  aid  to  military  efficiency.  While  most 
of  the  words  of  the  New  Testament  seem  to 
have  been  buried  clear  out  of  sight,  one  of 
them    has   dawned   on   the   governments    of 

115 


116  FARES,  PLEASE! 

Europe  as  never  before — "If  thine  hand  offend 
thee,  cut  it  off.''  Both  despotism  and  democ- 
racy have  made  a  ruthless  war  on  intoxication. 
In  the  field,  particularly,  the  ancient  faith  of 
many  commanders  in  the  value  of  "Dutch 
courage,"  which  term  denotes  the  artificial 
bravado  created  by  semi-intoxication,  has  been 
wholly  discounted.  This  is  a  war  of  the 
trenches,  in  which  victory  depends  not  on  the 
sudden  charge  of  half-crazed  men,  but  on  the 
long  endurance  and  sure  marksmanship  of  the 
gunners.  One  of  the  last  public  utterances 
of  Lord  Roberts,  was  that  in  his  judgment 
eight  tenths  of  the  value  of  a  soldier  depended 
on  his  efficiency  as  a  shot.  This  is  a  field 
where  the  "courage"  induced  by  alcohol  is 
ruinous.  The  war  is  being  fought  by  sober 
men.  Deeper  and  more  lasting  sources  of 
courage  than  that  of  the  distillery  have  been 
sought  and  found. 

This  newer  philosophy  of  the  culture  of 
courage  is  highly  significant  for  all  other 
aspects  of  life.  "Dutch  courage,"  or  the  false 
daring  and  bravado,  created  either  by  stimu- 
lants or  by  false  views  of  life  which  act  like 
intoxicants,  is  miserably  insufficient  for  the 
long  run  where  victory  turns  on  endurance. 


"DUTCH  COURAGE''  117 

The  life  that  wins  is  not  a  Charge  of  the  Light 
Brigade,  but  an  inch-by-inch  campaign  in 
trenches,  and  its  lasting  "nerve"  must  come 
from  the  deepest  springs. 

Intoxicants  and  drugs  furnish  a  deceptive 
and  abnormal  courage  for  many.  They  are 
"brave"  for  the  battle  in  the  pathetic  manner 
of  Tam  o'Shanter : 

Kings  may  be  blest,  but  Tam  was  glorious. 
O'er  all  the  ills  of  life  victorious. 

Poor  Tam !  It  was  the  kind  of  courage  that 
always  oozes  out  at  the  finger  tips.  Men  nerve 
themselves  for  some  particular  effort  with 
what  they  call  a  "pick-me-up,"  only  to  find  it 
a  "throw-me-down"  at  the  critical  time.  We 
have  gone  far  when  we  have  learned  that 
nature  does  not  relish  any  jokes  played  on  the 
nervous  system.  The  terrible  revenge  of  na- 
ture against  the  "jokes"  of  artificial  stimula- 
tion is  that  finally  the  system  fails  to  respond 
at  all. 

Rosy  and  superficial  views  of  life  are  the 
means  by  which  a  "fighting  front"  is  main- 
tained by  others.  They  overcome  evil  by  the 
deliciously  simple  expedient  of  the  ostrich — 
looking   the   other   way.      Christian    Science 


118  FARES,  PLEASE! 

keeps  its  devotees  keyed  up  by  denying  .the 
existence  of  evil.  New  Thought  tells  us  to 
keep  our  mind  so  occupied  with  pink  and 
yellow  thoughts  that  the  ugly  black  and  blue 
ones  can  never  hurt  us.  Both  of  them  make 
as  satisfactory  equipment  for  the  realities  of 
life  as  a  picnic  lunch  would  be  for  a  six- 
months'  campaign. 

Mere  motion  is  another  common  resort  for 
keeping  up  the  spirits.  Only  keep  life  spin- 
ning fast  enough  with  different  things  and  all 
will  be  well.  Thoughtlessness  is  made  the 
measure  of  its  buoyancy.  An  old  and  battered 
top  will  look  a  bright  red  so  long  as  it  is 
spinning  fast;  only  when  it  stops  does  its  real 
dinginess  appear.  So  an  artificial  thoughtless- 
ness due  to  mere  activity  often  passes  for  "the 
red  badge  of  courage." 

Lasting  valor  for  the  long  campaign  comes 
only  from  within.  The  secret  of  it  is  in  that 
word  in  the  Psalms,  "I  have  nourished  thee 
from  the  great  depths." 

The  consciousness  of  the  presence  and  power 
of  God  is  necessary  for  true  courage.  "Had 
it  not  been  for  thee,  my  soul  had  dwelt  in 
silence."  The  Cardinal  Legate  at  Augsburg 
said  to  Luther,  "Do  you  expect  your  princes 


"DUTCH  COURAGE"  119 

to  take  up  arms  to  defend  a  wretched  worm 
like  you?  I  tell  you,  No !  And  where  will  you 
be  then?"  Luther  calmly  replied,  "Right 
where  I  am  now,  in  the  hands  of  Almighty 
God." 

The  possession  of  truth  is  an  unfailing 
spring.  Make  our  lives  part  of  the  truth  and 
purpose  which  is  larger  than  our  personal 
aims,  and  we  destroy  the  paralyzing  hesitation 
of  self-consciousness.  The  heroic  valor  of  the 
trenches  of  northern  France,  on  both  sides, 
came  from  the  feeling  in  the  breasts  of  the 
men  that  they  were  part  of  a  larger  and  more 
glorious  thing  than  themselves — the  nation. 
When  we  can  say  truly,  "To  this  end  am  I 
come,  that  I  might  bear  witness  to  the  truth," 
w^e  have  the  spirit  which  enabled  the  Master  to 
face  the  power  of  Rome  itself  without  a  quiver. 

Love  of  men  completes  courage.  It  was  the 
large  source  of  the  fearlessness  of  Jesus.  He 
believed  so  deeply  in  men,  loved  so  strongly 
the  best  that  was  in  them,  that  he  was  never 
afraid  of  their  worst.  When  we  really  love 
men  we  are  delivered  from  the  fear  of  acting 
for  their  best  good. 


XXIII 

HIGHHANDED  TYRANNY 

Tyranny  has  never  been  popular  in 
America.  "When  a  long  train  of  abuses  and 
usurpations,  pursuing  invariably  the  same 
object,  evinces  a  design  to  reduce  them  under 
absolute  despotism,  it  is  their  right,  it  is  their 
duty,  to  throw  off  such  government  and  to 
provide  new  guards  for  their  future  security." 
These  are  the  glowing  words  of  the  Declara- 
tion of  Independence.  The  spirit  of  the  men 
who  risked  their  lives  in  signing  that  docu- 
ment has  been  bred  into  the  very  bone  of  later 
generations.  We  have  kept  the  form  and,  to 
a  very  large  degree,  the  substance  of  that  pro- 
test against  absolutism.  But  of  late  the 
national  conscience  has  been  deeply  stirred  by 
the  evidences  of  what  is  known  as  "invisible 
government."  Under  the  forms  of  the  popular 
will  there  has  developed  a  malign  and  unseen 
machinery  of  "influence"  which  has  exerted  a 
guiding  hand  on  legislation.  We  have  been 
called  to  a  fresh  crusade  for  some  kind  of  a 

120 


HIGH-HANDED  TYRANNY        121 

"new  freedom"  from  the  domination  of  large 
vested  interests,  to  reestablish  the  reality  as 
well  as  the  forms  of  popular  government,  a 
crusade  which  is  perhaps  the  most  hopeful 
movement  of  our  time. 

To  bring  it  ultimate  success  we  need  an 
assertion  of  freedom  that  runs  far  deeper  than 
the  freeing  of  legislation.  The  worst  kind  of 
invisible  government  of  a  people  is  that  which 
is  still  more  "invisible"  than  the  manipula- 
tions of  a  large  trust.  It  is  the  subtle  and 
insidious  high-handed  tyranny  of  popular 
ideals  and  commercial  standards  which  throw 
around  the  moral  and  spiritual  independence 
of  the  individual  a  shackling  despotism.  It 
consists  of  such  intangible  elements  as  ways 
of  looking  at  things  and  standards  of  value, 
but  which,  like  the  unseen  pull  of  gravitation, 
are  powerful  in  concrete  results. 

There  is  a  far  extended  tyranny  of  bigness 
which  infects  the  spirit  with  the  deadly  sure- 
ness  of  the  typhoid  germ.  G.  W.  Stevens,  in 
his  book  of  incisive  comment  on  America,  The 
Land  of  the  Dollar,  tells  of  having  a  creamer 
explained  to  him.  "  ^It  is  not  yet  finished,'  the 
owner  was  saying,  ^but  when  it  is,  I  antici- 
pate'— I  shuddered,  for  I  knew  what  was  com- 


122  FARES,  PLExiSE! 

ing — ^it  will  be  the  best  and  the  largest  in  the 
world.'  When  shall  I  ever  escape  this 
tyranny  of  the  biggest  thing  in  the  world?" 
Such  tyranny  shows  in  the  practical  accept- 
ance of  the  idea,  whether  the  bald  theory 
would  be  agreed  to  or  not,  that  the  quantity 
of  an  action,  a  business  or  result  of  any  kind, 
somehow  makes  up  for  its  quality.  W.  J. 
Bryan  says  there  are  three  kinds  of  larceny — 
petty  larceny,  grand  larceny,  and  glorious 
larceny.  "Glorious  larceny"  is  thieving  on 
such  a  large  scale  that  its  brilliant  success 
atones  for  its  moral  crookedness.  The  popular 
acclaim  which  mere  bigness  wins  trickles  down 
into  the  minds  of  multitudes  who  are  acting 
on  a  much  smaller  scale  and  gives  values  a 
pernicious  twist.  In  The  Turmoil  Booth  Tark- 
ington  has  put  the  creed  of  the  rampant  and 
dingy  commercialism  of  a  Western  city  in  this 
form: 

Give  me  of  Thyself,  O  Bigness; 

Power  to  get  more  Power; 

Riches  to  get  more  Riches; 

Give  me  of  thy  sweat  to  get  more  sweat 

Give  me  of  thy  Bigness  to  get  more  Bigness  for 

myself, 
O  Bigness,  for  thine  is  the  Power  and  the  Glory 
And  there  is  no  end  but  Bigness,  for  ever  and  ever. 


HIGH-HANDED  TYRANNY        123 

^^The  new  Freedom"  most  devoutly  to  be 
desired  is  that  quality  in  man  which  declines 
to  be  overawed  by  conventional  greatness  and 
goes  ahead  and  does  its  individual  best,  with- 
out making  the  silent  surrender  of  quality  to 
size. 

Hurry  is  a  ruthless  tyrannizer.  We  have 
barely  begun  to  recover  from  an  era  of  waste- 
ful pioneering  when  men  were  in  such  a  hurry 
to  secure  the  land  and  use  it  that  all  thought  of 
conserving  anything  for  future  use  was  for- 
gotten. The  attitude  to  posterity  was  that  of 
Sir  Boyle  Roche,  who  said  in  the  House  of 
Commons :  "Why  should  we  care  for  posterity? 
What  has  posterity  done  for  us?"  The  subway 
guard  tells  us  in  the  morning  to  "Step  lively !" 
and  we  listen  to  the  request  to  "Hurry  up !" 
most  of  the  day.  The  examples  we  see  urge  it. 
The  things  which  can  be  done  quickly,  the 
quick  profit,  the  immediate  reputation,  the 
pleasure  that  can  be  seized  rather  than  waited 
for — all  these  assume  the  largest  proportions 
and  appear  as  the  finest  prizes.  It  is  a  sad 
tyranny,  for  it  obscures  the  truth  that  the 
finest  things  in  life  are  never  won  in  a  hurry. 
It  takes  time  to  achieve  a  fine  friendship,  to 
mold  a  character  or  to  build  up  the  materials 


124  FARES,  PLEASE! 

of  a  lasting  happiness.  The  best  things  in  a 
forest  are  not  its  mushrooms  but  its  oaks,  and 
the  best  in  the  heart  must  grow. 

The  squeeze  of  the  crowd  flattens  out  indi- 
viduality by  its  despotic  demand  for  con- 
formity. It  instills  a  mean  terror  of  singu- 
larity. There  is  a  kind  of  nervous  affection 
known  to  medicine  as  agoraphobia — the  fear 
of  open  places.  The  person  afllicted  with  it 
has  an  ineradicable  aversion  to  standing  alone, 
away  from  people  or  the  shelter  of  some  build- 
ing. What  ravages  the  "fear  of  open  places" 
has  wrought  in  life,  where  one's  convictions 
would  lead  him  to  cut  across  the  accepted 
customs  of  his  associates!  The  right  gives 
place  to  the  "popular."  Professor  John  C. 
van  Dyke  has  described  the  degeneration  of  a 
colorist  in  the  field  of  art.  He  says  that  the 
painter  finds  out  that  "toned-down,  washed- 
out,  and  faded  colors  are  easier  to  harmonize 
than  fresher  ones,  and  where  he  formerly 
thought  to  win  by  affirmation,  he  makes  his 
color  negative  or  neutral  and  strives  that  it 
shall  not  offend."  "Toned-down,  washed-out, 
and  neutral  colors"  are  sadly  flapping  from 
the  rigging  of  many  a  life  once  bravely  decked 
out  with  the  positive  hues  of  conviction. 


HIGH-HANDED  TYRANNY        125 

You  have  read  the  Declaration  of  Independ- 
ence and  are  proud  of  it.  Have  you  ever  made 
one  of  your  own?  Emerson  says,  "To  every 
young  man  or  woman  the  world  puts  the  same 
question,  Wilt  thou  become  one  of  us?'  and 
the  soul  in  each  of  them  answers  heartily, 
^No !'  The  world  has  no  interest  so  deep  as  to 
cherish  that  resistance." 


XXIV 

A  HAIR-TKIGGER  CONSTITUTION 

Probably  no  one  has  given  a  better  descrip- 
tion of  the  temperament  we  all  know  only  too 
well,  and  describe  as  a  "hair-trigger  constitu- 
tion/' than  Lord  Macaulay.  Writing  of  Lord 
Glengarry,  a  Scotchman  of  the  time  of  Dun- 
dee's Rebellion,  he  says,  "He  was  one  of  those 
persons  who  think  it  dignified  to  imagine  that 
other  people  are  always  insulting  them."  We 
call  them  "touchy,"  "thin-skinned,"  "sensi- 
tive," sometimes  with  a  skin  so  tender  that  it 
responds  to  any  allusion  that  can  be  construed 
into  a  personal  reflection,  with  all  the  im- 
mediacy of  an  open  blister.  "Get  the  facts 
first,"  says  Mark  Twain  in  "My  First  Lie," 
"and  then  you  can  distort  them  as  you  please." 
Most  any  fact  can  be  distorted  by  the  man  with 
a  hair-trigger  constitution  into  a  grievous 
personal  thrust  at  himself.  The  root  of  the 
malady  is  in  a  self-consciousness  that  never 
sleeps.  It  is  doomed,  like  a  ghost,  to  continu- 
ally walk,  alive  and  alert.    The  family  crest, 

126 


HAIR-TRIGGER  CONSTITUTION  127 

appropriately  hanging  over  many  an  office 
desk  might  well  be  the  old  flag  of  the  Green 
Mountain  Boys  in  the  Revolution,  with  its 
coiled  serpent  and  the  legend,  "Don't  tread  on 
me !"  The  most  general  observations  are  mar- 
velously  distilled  into  particular  and  personal 
remarks.  In  a  very  different  sense  from  that 
applied  by  Shakespeare  to  the  poet,  they  "give 
to  airy  nothing  a  local  habitation  and  a  name.'' 
Sometimes  we  apply  the  term  "hair-trigger" 
not  only  to  a  sensitive  vanity,  but  also  to  a 
general  irritability  which  is  ready  to  explode 
at  a  moment's  notice.  A  gentleman  in  Indiana 
has  compounded  a  substance  called  Mitchelite, 
which  is  claimed  to  be  the  most  powerful 
explosive  known.  But  it  may  be  doubted 
whether  its  tendency  to  ignite  without  overdue 
persuasion  may  not  be  matched  and  over- 
matched by  many  human  parallels.  Such  a 
nervous  tension  is  not  by  any  means  the  prod- 
uct of  modern  times,  but  it  has  been  vastly 
augmented  and  specialized  by  the  city's  speed 
and  din.  A  good  deal  of  the  saltpeter  in  the 
human  constitution  comes  from  the  jangle  and 
jar  of  the  crowd.  "Do  you  count  the  sheep 
jumping  over  a  fence?"  a  man  suffering  from 
insomnia  was  asked.    "No,"  he  answered.    "I 


128  FARES,  PLEASE! 

count  the  automobiles  as  they  whiz  by."  The 
reply  puts  the  whole  change  of  a  generation 
in  a  nutshell.  All  the  myriad  kinds  and  de- 
grees of  "whizzes"  tend  to  the  upbuilding  of 
the  hair-trigger  constitution. 

Such  a  temperament  wonderfully  adds  to 
the  minor  earthquakes  of  life.  Yet  there  is  a 
cardinal  place  in  the  scheme  of  things  for  the 
"touchy"  person.  Touchiness  may  be  made  of 
splendid  use,  not  by  being  obliterated  directly, 
but  by  being  focused  at  a  new  point.  Jesus 
was  the  "touchiest"  person  who  ever  lived. 
There  is  a  sensitiveness  and  an  alertness  which 
is  a  divine  grace,  as  well  as  that  which  is  a 
human  fault,  and  each  continually  asks  the 
same  question,  "Who  touched  me?"  Only  one 
with  a  "hair-trigger"  personality  would  ever 
have  felt  the  mute  appeal  of  the  suffering 
woman  in  the  crowd  who  put  forth  her  hand 
to  touch  the  hem  of  His  garment.  Jesus  was 
instantly  alive  to  the  smallest  disturbance  in 
his  environment.  Such  disturbance  did  not 
touch  his  vanity,  for  he  had  none.  It  unerr- 
ingly struck  something  deeper — his  sympathy. 
There  was  no  more  miraculous  quality  about 
him  than  a  sympathy  which  not  only  goes  out 
to  the  multitude,  but  so  acutely  alert  and 


HAIR-TKIGGER  CONSTITUTION  129 

quick  that  it  could  pick  out  the  one  needy 
woman  from  the  crowd  as  deftly  as  the  magnet 
picks  up  the  piece  of  steel  from  other  matter. 
We  may  well  add  to  the  common  complaint  of 
the  traditional  portrait  of  Christ,  that  it 
utterly  misses  his  strength,  this  other  lack, 
that  it  necessarily  fails  to  convey  the  alertness, 
the  qui  vive^  which  was  always  with  him. 

Such  a  "touchiness"  as  was  Christ's,  his 
"tangibility"  we  might  say,  is  always  one  of 
the  world's  greatest  needs.  So  easily,  much 
of  our  daily  walk,  so  far  as  ability  to  imagine 
need  and  quickness  to  respond  to  it  are  con- 
cerned, becomes  a  sort  of  sleep-walking.  The 
"hair-trigger"  quality  of  Christ's  sympathy 
comes  partly  from  two  qualities  which  can  be 
reproduced — alertness  and  dramatic  power. 
Like  the  vanity  of  the  man  who  so  easily  finds 
slights,  the  sympathy  of  Jesus  was  always  on 
"field  duty,"  reaching  out  for  the  barest  possi- 
bility of  its  exercise.  Lack  of  alertness  sub- 
tracts largely  from  the  possible  blessing  be- 
stowed by  even  the  tenderest  heart.  It  must 
not  only  have  something  to  give  stored  away 
but  the  dispatch  of  a  trigger  to  move  it. 

We  fail  often,  too,  through  lack  of  exercise 
of  dramatic  power.    True  sympathy  calls  for 


130  FARES,  PLEASE! 

the  art  of  making  a  swift  and  veracious  pic- 
ture of  a  person  or  situation.  Whatever  dra- 
matic power  one  may  have  or  develop  will  be 
Inore  largely  and  fruitfully  utilized  in  the  path 
of  Christian  discipleship  than  in  any  other 
sphere  on  earth.  Sympathy,  so  far  from  being 
a  weak  and  mushy  sentimentalism,  is  the  most 
intellectual  operation  a  man  may  engage  in. 
It  calls  for  seeing  and  understanding  all  the 
elements  in  a  situation  and  putting  himself 
lovingly  in  imagination  in  the  midst  of  them. 
The  Christian  who  responds  with  heart  and 
brain  to  the  varied  and  complex  needs  of 
others  has  composed  a  library  of  dramas,  as  he 
makes  their  situation  live  before  him. 

The  negative  virtue  of  the  "hair  trigger'^ 
man  is  that  he  is  abnormally  awake.  It  may 
be  transformed  into  a  rare  instrument  of 
power  by  changing  its  focus. 


XXV 

THE  LATEST  THINjG 

When  G.  Lowes  Dickinson  made  his  first 
visit  to  America  he  came  to  the  conclusion  that 
the  dominant  national  passion  was  for  wealth. 
On  his  second  visit  he  revised  that  judgment 
as  being  superficial  and  decided  that  the  great 
ambition  was  not  so  much  for  wealth  as  for 
power.  On  his  last  visit,  however,  he  con- 
cluded that  the  ruling  passion  was  neither  for 
wealth  nor  for  power,  but  for  acceleration. 
There  are  moments  when  the  simple  process  of 
crossing  the  street  leads  us  all  to  agree  with 
him. 

There  are  also  moments  when  our  observa- 
tion would  lead  us  to  set  up  alongside  of  ac- 
celeration as  an  ideal  which  holds  a  wide  and 
growing  sway,  the  passion  for  novelty,  the 
desire  to  be  sure  that  one  is  doing,  seeing, 
wearing,  or  thinking — the  Latest  Thing. 

John  Galsworthy,  in  his  book  of  bright  and 
sharp,  but  not  bitter,  satires.  The  Little  Man, 
has  drawn  an  exquisite  portrait  of  a  woman 

131 


132  FARES,  PLEASE! 

whose  life  was  a  chase  of  the  Latest  Thing, 
showing  the  mental  vacuum  which  was  always 
regarded  by  her  as  "living  her  life  to  the  full." 
Nearly  every  line  of  his  keen  description  sug- 
gests traits  which  are  easily  recognizable  as 
old  acquaintances.  "To  look  at  a  thing,"  he 
says  of  this  Passionate  Pilgrim  of  the  New, 
"without  possessing  it  was  intolerable,  but  to 
keep  it  after  she  had  got  it  was  even  more  so. 
She  had  flung  open  all  the  doors  of  life  and 
was  so  continuously  going  out  and  coming  in, 
that  life  had  considerable  difficulty  in  catching 
a  glimpse  of  her  at  all."  She  was  "a  mere 
perpetual  glancing  from  quick-sliding  eyes,  to 
see  the  next  move,  to  catch  a  new  movement, 
God  bless  it!"  She  swam  "on  the  full  deep 
river  of  sensations,  nibbling  each  other's 
tails.  To  say  that  she  had  her  favorite 
books,  plays,  men,  dogs,  colors,  was  to  do  her 
but  momentary  justice.  A  deeper  equity 
assigned  her  only  one  favorite,  the  Next,  and 
for  the  sake  of  that  one  favorite,  no  Catherine, 
no  Semiramis,  no  Messalina,  could  more 
swiftly  depose  all  the  others.  Life,  she  thought, 
must  be  so  dull  for  the  poor  creatures  doing 
one  thing  at  a  time  and  that  for  so  long." 
In  one  sentence  of  his  description,  Gals- 


THE  LATEST  THING  133 

worthy  touches  the  real  destructiveness  of  the 
enthronement  of  novelty  as  the  ruling  passion. 
"Life  was  so  full  that  the  moment  it  stood 
still,  and  was  simply  old  life,  it  seemed  to  be 
no  life  at  all."  There  is  one  passage  as  full 
of  spiritual  understanding  as  it  is  of  delicious 
satire:  "Once  in  a  new  book  she  came  across 
a  tale  of  a  man  who  4ived'  in  Persia,  of  all 
heavenly  places,  frantically  pursuing  sensa- 
tion. Entering,  one  day,  the  courtyard  of  his 
house,  he  heard  a  sigh  behind  him,  and  looking 
around,  saw  his  own  spirit,  apparently  in  the 
act  of  breathing  its  last.  The  little  thing,  dry 
and  white,  was  opening  and  shutting  its  mouth 
for  all  the  world  like  an  oyster  trying  to 
breathe.  'What  is  it?'  he  said.  'You  don't 
seem  well.'  And  his  spirit  answered:  'It's  all 
right,  it's  all  right.  Don't  distress  yourself. 
It's  nothing.  I've  been  crowded  out,  that's 
all.'  And  with  a  wheeze,  the  little  thing  went 
flat."  "The  moon,"  Galsworthy  concludes, 
"was  as  yet  the  only  thing  which  had  eluded 
her  avidity,  that — and  her  own  soul." 

We  see  this  quest  at  the  top  of  the  social 
ladder  in  the  American  woman  in  Paris  who 
offers  a  prize  of  five  thousand  dollars  to  any 
one   who    will   invent   a   really    new   social 


134  FARES,  PLEASE  I 

"stunt."  We  see  it  daily  in  the  most  ordinary 
spheres.  Owen  Wister  tells  of  a  lady  who 
went  into  the  Public  Library  in  Philadelphia 
and  asked  the  librarian  to  recommend  a  book. 
He  gave  her  one,  but  she  looked  at  the  title 
page  in  disgust.  "Why,  this  is  a  year  old,"  she 
said.  "Give  me  something  new."  So  he 
handed  her  one  that  had  just  been  laid  that 
day  by  Robert  W.  Chambers.  We  see  it  in  the 
folks  who  follow  the  call  of  "off  with  the  old 
love,  on  with  the  new,"  and  whose  friendships, 
in  the  words  of  Douglass  Jerrold,  "are  so 
warm,  that  they  no  sooner  take  them  up  than 
they  must  lay  them  down  again."  Most  sadly 
do  we  see  it  in  the  numbers  who  rarely  ever 
follow  through  any  helpful  piece  of  service, 
before  they  are  lured  away  by  some  new  will- 
o'-the-wisp. 

The  cult  of  the  Latest  Thing  makes  super- 
ficial people.  The  real  satisfaction  and  value 
of  our  experiences  do  not  come  in  the  door- 
ways and  porches,  but  in  the  living  rooms ;  in 
the  things  we  know  well  enough  and  have 
worked  at  long  and  patiently  enough  to  obtain 
their  real  reward.  That  only  final  source  of 
happiness,  character,  never  comes  from  a 
sight-seeing  tour,  but  from  the  settled  proc- 


THE  LATEST  THING  135 

esses  of  work  and  home.  The  hunt  of  the 
Latest  Thing  yields  only  shells.  Dr.  Cabot 
has  cleverly  parodized  some  lines  from  "The 
Village  Blacksmith" : 

Toiling,  rejoicing,  sorrowing, 

So  I  my  life  conduct. 

Each  morning  sees  some  task  begun. 

Each  evening  sees  it  chucked. 

It  makes  irresponsible  people.  The  work  of 
the  world  cannot  be  done  by  jumping-jacks, 
and  its  working  capital  of  hope  and  courage 
and  love  has  an  old-fashioned  way  of  being 
little  affected  by  whether  a  thing  is  novel  or 
not.  "The  first  quality  of  a  soldier,"  said 
Thiers,  "is  constancy  in  enduring  fatigue  and 
privation.  Valor  is  only  the  second."  The 
warfare  of  the  Kingdom  depends  on  the  same 
first  quality. 

There  are  many  roads  to  monotony ,  but  the 
surest  and  most  direct  is  the  quest  of  the 
Latest  Thing.  Eeal  novelty  in  life  is  always 
an  inner  freshness  and  never  an  outward 
change.  The  person  whose  faithfulness  in 
individual  and  social  service  yields  him  the 
glory  of  seeing  new  growth  in  the  personality 
of  others,  lives  always  in  a  new  world.    No  life 


136  FARES,  PLEASE! 

on  earth  ever  teemed  with  such  startling 
novelties  as  did  that  of  Jesus.  He  saw  the 
travail  of  his  soul  and  was  satisfied.  "I  have 
meat  to  eat  that  ye  know  not  of." 


XXVI 

OVER  THE  WALL 

"By  my  God  have  I  leaped  over  a  wall." 

In  these  words  David  at  the  zenith  of  his 
career  as  king  at  Jerusalem  recalls  the  athletic 
buoyancy  of  his  boyhood  days  on  the  Bethle- 
hem hills.  His  heart  returns  in  the  fullness 
of  his  years  to  the  free  life  of  the  shepherd  boy 
with  its 

leaping  from  rock  up  to  rock, 
The  strong  rending  of  boughs  from  the  fir  tree,  the  cool 
silver  shock 
Of  a  plunge  in  the  pool's  living  water. 

As  his  mind  lovingly  returns  to  that  life  of 
the  hills,  it  occurs  to  him  that  the  old  acro- 
batic leap  of  his  boyhood  is  a  figure  large 
enough  to  express  the  divine  romance  of  his 
providential  career.  His  has  been  a  strange 
history,  successively  surmounting  walls  that 
rose  up  before  him  and  overshadowed  his  spirit, 
and  he  gratefully  recognizes  that  it  has  been 
by  his  God  that  he  has  leaped  over  them.    If 

137 


138  FARES,  PLEASE! 

we  will  glance  at  three  swiftly  moving  pictures 
in  the  life  of  this  king,  we  will  find  that  the 
words  are  not  only  large  enough  to  give  us 
the  secret  of  David's  life,  but  may  afford  a 
true  transcript  of  any  spiritual  history. 

The  first  is  the  dark  picture  of  the  man 
hedged  in  by  the  walls  of  a  great  sin.  The  man 
after  God's  own  heart  is  overshadowed  by  the 
black  murder  done  at  the  dictates  of  passion. 
We  rarely  see  the  real  nature  of  sin  so  clearly 
as  in  David,  a  man  so  responsive  to  spiritual 
impressions,  so  full  of  the  riches  of  heart's 
affection,  so  strong,  so  much  of  a  genius,  so 
steadily  ascending  in  power  and  character! 
What  a  dismal  anticlimax  his  sin  was ! 

It  would  only  have  been  in  line  with  innu- 
merable life  tragedies  if,  in  his  remorse,  he 
had  thought  of  himself  as  fallen  like  Lucifer, 
never  to  rise  again.  That  is  so  often  the  his- 
tory, an  aspiring  upward  path  and  then  a  drop 
into  a  deep  well.  And  they  accept  the  fall. 
How  many  spiritual  histories  could  be  told 
in  the  couplet  of  George  Macdonald — 

There  came  a  mist  and  a  blinding  rain, 
And  life  was  never  the  same  again. 

But  David  did  not  stay  in  the  pit.     By  his 


OVER  THE  WALL  139 

God  lie  leaped  over  the  wall.  Read  that  inter- 
view with  Nathan  and  its  searching  convic- 
tion, "Thou  art  the  man,"  and  then  that 
marvelous  prayer  of  penitence,  "Against  thee, 
thee  only,  have  I  sinned."  Quick  as  a  flash — 
the  word  is  poor,  for  no  flash  ever  went  off  so 
quickly  as  the  movement  of  God's  heart  to  true 
repentance — God  answers,  "I  have  forgiven 
thee." 

The  great  thing  about  the  sin  of  David  was 
that  it  was  a  parenthesis.  It  was  not  a  full 
stop,  and  after  the  break  in  the  story  the 
thread  of  grace  is  taken  up  again.  David  did 
not  leap  over  the  wall  of  sin  by  merely  saying, 
"That  was  a  bad  mistake ;  I  must  do  better  in 
the  future."  We  know  how  little  that  avails. 
We  cannot  lift  ourselves  out  of  the  pit  by  our 
own  boot-straps.  We  conquer  sin,  not  by  tak- 
ing thought  but  by  taking  God,  and  are  lifted 
from  the  mire  by  the  strong  cords  of  a  forgiv- 
ing, redeeming  love. 

The  second  picture  is  a  brighter  one.  It  is 
in  the  cave  where  his  enemy,  Saul,  is  sleeping 
in  David's  power.  Between  them  the  towering 
walls  of  antipathy,  dislike,  and  fear  have  risen 
up  as  barriers,  and  the  swift  thought  of  the 
sword  as  an  easy  way  to  end  it  all  rushes  into 


140  FARES,  PLEASE! 

David's  mind.  But  he  escapes  by  bringing 
into  their  relation  the  thought  of  God.  This 
man  Saul,  this  man  that  he  does  not  like  and 
with  good  reason,  is  still  the  Lord's  anointed, 
still  has  claims  on  his  consideration. 

What  a  high  and  strong  leap  this  overcom- 
ing of  the  walls  of  resentment  and  prejudice 
is,  we  all  know.  Racial,  social,  and  personal 
barriers  to  our  sympathy  rise  up  on  every 
hand.  Samuel  Johnson  said  a  very  typical 
thing  when  he  declared  that  "he  could  like 
everybody  except  an  American."  We  all  have 
our  own  Bills  of  Exceptions.  It  was  Scotch- 
men with  Charles  Lamb,  whom  he  said  he  had 
been  trying  to  like  all  his  life  without  any 
success.  We  say  we  can  work  with  any  one 
except  this  particular  person  or  that  "He 
gets  on  our  nerves."  We  do  not  often  over- 
come our  imperfect  sympathies  by  a  reasoned 
process.  We  leap  over  the  wall  of  dislike  and 
exclusion  only  as  David  did,  by  getting  a  God's 
eye  view  of  the  other  man.  It  was  only  when 
the  early  church  learned  with  Paul  to  see  in 
the  contemned  Gentile  and  the  barbarian 
without  the  law  the  brothers  for  whom  Christ 
died  that  it  was  welded  into  that  conquering 
union   which   knew   neither   bond   nor   free, 


OVER  THE  WALL  141 

Scythian  nor  Barbarian.  No  matter  what 
may  be  the  extent  of  our  estate  or  what  man- 
sions we  may  erect,  we  shall  never  succeed  in 
building  anything  but  a  little  prison  house 
for  our  spirits  unless  we  get  the  divine  view 
of  human  relationships. 

The  last  picture  is  a  sublime  one.  The  little 
child  of  David  has  died.  But  he  refuses  to 
accept  as  final  the  dark  walls  of  death.  He 
makest  the  magnificent  leap  of  faith  in  immor- 
tality. "He  shall  not  come  to  me,  but  I  shall 
go  to  him."  It  is  not  the  perfect  faith  as  we 
know  it  in  the  New  Testament.  David  did  not 
have  the  ladder  of  Christ  by  which  to  make 
the  surer  climb.  But  it  is  probably  the  fairest 
foregleam  of  immortality  to  be  found  in  the 
Old  Testament. 

In  the  shadow  of  that  same  wall  of  death 
we  have  all  sat  before;  there  we  shall  all  sit 
again.  And  no  matter  how  far  we  have  ad- 
vanced in  spiritual  knowledge  over  the  days 
of  Israel's  kings,  it  is  still  a  leap  of  faith  by 
which  we  get  into  the  sunlight  of  hope  and 
comfort.  It  even  seems  a  longer  leap  to  some 
to-day  because  of  the  many  newly  disclosed 
ties,  showing  our  physical  relationship  to  the 
other  creatures.     In  the  Museum  of  Natural 


142    •  FARES,  PLEASE! 

History  in  New  York  city  there  is  a  striking 
series  of  the  skeletons  of  the  primates, 
arranged  in  the  order  of  their  ascent.  At  the 
head  of  the  list  there  is  a  skeleton  of  a  man, 
bearing  a  certain  number,  by  its  inclusion  in 
that  collection  seeming  to  tell  us:  "Here  you 
are.  A  little  better  than  the  other  apes,  a 
little  more  intelligent,  more  long-lived  and 
adaptable.    That  is  all.'' 

All?  No!  Faith  says,  "I  accept  the  hori- 
zontal lines  that  show  my  physical  affinities 
to  the  other  creatures  of  earth;  but  I  see  and 
hold  to  the  vertical  line  that  runs  upward, 
binding  me  as  a  child  to  an  infinite  Father,  in 
whose  heart  I  have  an  eternal  worth."  Faith 
says  with  Paul,  "O  death,  where  is  thy  sting?" 
It  says  with  Euskin,  "Why  should  we  wear 
black  for  the  guests  of  God?" 


XXVII 

CLOUDING  THE  ISSUE 

In  all  the  catalogue  of  political  tricks  there 
is  no  form  of  cleverness  which  brings  larger 
returns  than  skill  in  "clouding  the  issue." 
This  art  carries  an  argument  by  discussing 
something  distantly  related  to  it  and  succeeds 
in  making  the  whole  thing  turn  on  a  point 
which  has  little  or  nothing  to  do  with  it. 
Millions  of  unsophisticated  citizens  have  voted 
to  have  the  city  treasury  looted  by  a  gang  of 
thieves  because  the  scheme  was  cleverly  draped 
with  the  national  flag  while  the  band  played 
"The  Star-Spangled  Banner."  We  may  smile 
at  the  Carolina  mountaineer  who  came  up  to 
the  polling  booth  a  few  years  ago  to  cast  his 
ballot  for  Jefferson  Davis ;  but  it  is  not  quite 
so  amusing  to  think  that  there  are  large  num- 
bers of  people  who  vote  the  Republican  or 
Democratic  ticket  at  strictly  local  elections 
because  of  their  admiration  of  Lincoln  or  their 
reverence  for  the  memory  of  the  late  Thomas 
Jefferson.    This  is  the  high  art  of  the  liquor 

143 


144  FARES,  PLEASE! 

propagandist  who  seeks  to  cloud  the  question 
of  the  moral  and  economic  curse  of  the  saloon 
with  the  specious  issue  of  "personal  liberty." 

Looked  at  in  view  of  all  of  its  consequences, 
this  guileless  "innocence"  of  allowing  the 
judgment  to  be  confused  by  things  irrelevant, 
is  a  deadly  form  of  sin.  The  cleverness  which 
causes  it  is  part  of  that  strategy  which  makes 
up  the  largest  part  of  the  destructive  power  of 
all  sin,  its  ingenuity  of  disguise.  It  is  an 
ingenuity  which  dates  from  Eden,  and  every- 
thing new  to  be  said  about  it  was  old  centuries 
ago.  It  is  a  question,  however,  whether  the 
old  pitfall  of  the  disguises  and  fictions  of  sin 
does  not  merit  a  freshened  attention  because 
of  a  sure  growth  of  softening  the  asperities  of 
life  in  the  language  used  in  the  social  and 
business  world. 

Whatever  may  be  the  reason,  whether  from 
an  advance  in  politeness  or  a  more  adroit 
salesmanship,  old-fashioned  plain  and  harsh 
words  are  giving  place  to  more  subdued 
and  inviting  ones.  What  used  to  be  called 
"cast-off"  clothing  is  advertised  and  sold  as 
"slightly  used" — a  much  more  mild  and  agree- 
able term.  Instead  of  the  old  term  "boarders" 
we  see  frequent  advertisements  which  refer 


CLOUDING  THE  ISSUE  145 

to  "table  guests.''  Who  ever  hears  of  a  second- 
hand typewriter  now?  It  is  always  a  "rebuilt 
machine."  The  clerk  in  the  department  store 
is  instructed  never  to  ask  if  the  buyer  wishes 
something  "cheaper."  She  deftly  suggests 
"something  less  expensive" — a  much  more 
flattering  way  of  saying  the  same  thing. 
When  a  man  is  sick  we  learn  that  he  is  "indis- 
posed." The  old-fashioned  cabinet  photograph 
which  etched  our  features  with  pitiless  truth 
has  given  place  to  the  "art  study"  which 
endows  us  all  with  the  distinction  of  beauty. 

That  all  this  makes  for  pleasantness  no  one 
can  deny.  But  with  the  glossing  over  of  hard 
and  plain  names  of  things  in  the  minor  depart- 
ments of  life,  there  is  the  very  real  danger  of 
transferring  the  same  pleasant  process  to  its 
major  departments  and  ending  up  with  toning 
down  the  asperities  of  sin.  There  is  danger 
of  a  kind  of  moral  "aphasia,"  which  malady 
consists  in  being  unable  to  remember  the  right 
names  of  things.  And  "that  way  lies  mad- 
ness." It  is  hard  enough  at  the  best.  The 
same  thing  which  is  "stubbornness"  in  another 
is  usually  labeled  "firmness"  when  it  appears 
in  ourselves.  The  "stinginess"  of  some  one 
else  is  only  "prudence"  when  we  act  the  same 


146  FARES,  PLEASE! 

way.  And  the  same  words  which  on  the  other 
fellow's  tongue  show  "cowardice,"  on  our  own 
are  an  instance  of  a  "wise  caution." 

The  strategy  of  sin  has  won  its  battle  when 
it  gets  us  to  call  it  by  another  name.  One  of 
the  most  perfect  pictures  of  the  strategy  of  sin 
is  the  story  in  the  book  of  Joshua,  of  the  device 
of  the  Gibeonites  who  wished  to  form,  for  their 
own  advantage,  an  alliance  with  Israel.  Israel 
had  been  forbidden  to  make  alliances  of  any 
kind,  and  the  ambassadors  of  the  Gibeonites 
put  forward  three  pleas  to  show  why  this 
alliance  with  them  could  do  no  harm.  These 
three  pleas  voice  in  absolutely  perfect  form 
the  three  main  strokes  of  sin  in  clouding  the 
issue.    They  said: 

1.  "TFe  are  come  from  a  far  country/^  This 
was  the  ingratiating  start.  "There  can  be  no 
evil  consequences,  for  we  live  so  far  away." 
So  speaks  the  voice  of  every  temptation  from 
that  of  Eve  down  to  the  one  we  met  an  hour 
ago.  The  danger  seems  remote,  chimerical. 
Others  might  possibly  be  harmed  but  not  us. 

2.  ^^We  are  come  on  account  of  Jehovah^ 
your  God/'  Here  is  diplomacy  of  the  highest 
order.  Temptation  never  suggests  that  we 
part  with  our  religion.    It  whispers  that  there 


CLOUDING  THE  ISSUE  147 

is  no  real  antagonism  between  our  religion 
and  the  course  suggested.  Unthinkable!  It 
will  even  help  Jehovah !  There  is  hardly  any 
sin  whose  real  character  cannot  be  clouded 
with  a  religious  motive.  When  a  fresh  ship- 
load of  slaves  from  Africa  was  Unloaded  at 
Newport  in  colonial  days  the  minister  publicly 
rendered  fervent  thanks  to  God  for  his  provi- 
dence in  "bringing  these  benighted  blacks 
under  the  blessed  influence  of  the  gospel."  He 
probably  deceived  every  one — ^including  him- 
self— except  the  Almighty. 

3.  "We  are  your  servants/'  Here  was  the 
oily  culmination.  Temptation  comes  as  oppor- 
tunity. It  is  the  chance  of  a  lifetime  for 
knowledge,  power,  advancement,  all  of  which, 
of  course,  will  be  put  to  a  fine  use ! 

The  Israelites  learned  that  all  this  golden 
eloquence  boiled  down  finally  into  one  "short 
and  ugly  word."  They  were  lies.  Sin  is 
always  near  in  its  results;  it  is  atheistic;  it 
never  serves  but  always  rules. 

"The  approach  to  Constantinople  reveals  the 
most  beautiful  city  in  the  world.  The  glamour 
and  romance  of  the  East  become  for  the  mo- 
ment realities.  But  presently  the  onlooker 
begins  to  lose  the  ensemble.    The  forms  of  the 


148  PARES,  PLEASE! 

buildings  become  grotesque;  the  streets  grow 
squalid  and  the  people  and  dogs  make  up  a 
mean  and  hideous  entanglement  of  life."  A 
fair  picture  of  the  refractions  of  sin.  The 
only  sure  method  of  correcting  them  is  the 
daring  of  Joshua's  dealing  with  the  unknown 
angel,  to  demand,  clear  down  to  the  end  of 
every  serpentine  coil  of  reasoning,  "Art  thou 
for  us  or  for  our  enemies?" 


XXVIII 
THE  FALLACY  OF  PREPARATION 

In  one  of  the  earlier  chapters  of  her  auto- 
biography, Twenty  Years  at  Hull  House,  Miss 
Jane  Addams  describes  the  mood  of  dissatis- 
faction which  came  over  her  at  the  end  of  the 
year  of  European  study,  following  her  college 
course.  It  was  the  indefinite  feeling  of  being 
tired  of  spending  such  a  long  time  in  prepar- 
ing for  a  work  which  was  not  as  yet  clearly 
defined  or  indicated.  She  says  that  she  felt 
as  though  she  had  made  the  discovery  of  a 
practical  fallacy  which  was  not  mentioned  in 
the  time-honored  list  in  the  books  of  logic — 
the  fallacy  of  preparation.  By  that  expression 
she  denotes  the  danger  of  missing  many  of  the 
opportunities  of  life  while  engaged  on  the 
praiseworthy  business  of  preparing  for  them, 
and  especially  missing  that  finest  part  of 
preparation  that  comes  only  through  active 
service. 

It  is  a  noteworthy  phrase — the  fallacy  of 

149 


150  FAKES,  PLEASE! 

preparation.  In  these  days  of  scientific  effi- 
ciency and  specialization  in  business  and  pro- 
fessions and  social  and  religious  work  as  well, 
there  is  not  much  danger  of  the  importance 
of  training  being  lost  sight  of.  But  there  is 
always  danger  of  our  making  the  lack  of  train- 
ing or  waiting  for  an  ideal  completeness  of 
preparation  an  excuse  for  failing  to  seize  the 
immediate  opportunities  of  service  which  are 
at  hand,  and  which  are  very  likely  to  prove 
the  best  our  lives  will  ever  afford. 

No  career  that  comes  to  mind  affords  quite 
so  complete  an  instance  of  the  working  of  this 
fallacy  as  does  that  of  General  George  B.  Mc- 
Clellan.  The  Army  of  the  Potomac  needed 
first  of  all  a  drill-master  and  McClellan  filled 
that  requirement  to  a  supreme  degree.  Yet, 
while  appreciating  that  need,  he  swung  to  the 
other  extreme  of  waiting  for  that  readiness 
which  in  his  mind  would  justify  an  engage- 
ment, and  the  judgment  of  military  history  is 
that  some  of  the  most  strategic  opportunities 
of  the  war  rushed  by  while  he  waited.  General 
Meade  said  of  him,  "He  was  always  waiting  to 
get  everything  just  as  he  wanted  before  he 
would  attack,  and  before  he  could  get  things 
arranged  just  as  he  wanted  them  the  enemy 


FALLACY  OF  PREPARATION     151 

pounced  on  him  and  thwarted  all  his  plans. 
There  is  now  no  doubt  that  he  allowed  three 
distinct  occasions  to  take  Richmond  to  slip 
through  his  hand  for  want  of  nerve  to  run 
what  he  considered  risks."  He  could  never  rid 
himself  of  the  delusion  that  the  enemy's  force 
was  far  greater  than  his  own,  and  the  actual 
figures  always  proved  him  wrong.  His  con- 
stant complaint  in  the  Peninsular  campaign 
was  his  lack  of  men,  when  the  records  later 
showed  that  against  his  one  hundred  thousand 
men  Lee  had  an  army  of  only  sixty-three  thou- 
sand. 

Life  can  be  wasted  in  drilling  just  as  sadly 
as  in  open  profligacy.  "We  refuse  sympathy 
and  intimacy  with  people,"  writes  Emerson, 
"as  if  we  waited  for  some  better  sympathy  and 
intimacy  to  come.  But  whence  and  where? 
To-morrow  will  be  like  to-day.  Life  wastes 
itself  while  we  are  preparing  to  live."  The 
real  truth  of  the  matter,  so  easily  lost  sight  of, 
is  that  preparation  and  achievement  can  never 
be  wholly  separated.  Each  is  a  part  of  the 
other. 

In  the  service  of  the  Kingdom,  holding  one- 
self aloof  from  its  tasks  while  waiting  for  some 
vague,  ideal  readiness  has  wrought  incalcu- 


152  FARES,  PLEASE! 

lable  loss.  We  do  well  to  wish  to  be  workmen 
needing  not  to  be  ashamed.  It  is  well  to  refuse 
to  offer  to  the  Master  only  the  tattered  rem- 
nants of  our  time  and  attention.  The  old 
question  of  David  should  never  be  forgotten: 
"Shall  I  offer  to  the  Lord  that  which  cost  me 
nothing?"  But  it  is  just  as  important  to 
ponder  the  deep  meaning  of  Jesus's  injunction 
to  the  hanger  back:  "Let  the  dead  bury  the 
dead,  but  go  thou  and  preach  the  kingdom  of 
God."  We  wait  for  time  before  we  are  ready 
to  do  this  or  that,  forgetting  that  time  for  any 
unselfish  service  is  never  an  accident,  but 
ahvays  a  creation.  We  wait  for  some  other 
place ^  under  the  superstition  that  we  shall  find 
that  ideal  condition  which  shall  justify  our 
efforts;  whereas  the  one  truth  which  several 
moves  bring  home  to  the  mind  is  not  so  much 
that  all  places  are  alike,  for  that  is  not  true, 
but  that  to  a  large  extent  we  carry  our  own 
place  with  us,  and  that  our  own  attitude  and 
disposition  are  the  most  determining  parts  of 
our  environment.  We  wait  for  the  right  mood^ 
some  sparkling  hour  of  inspiration  which  shall 
sweep  us  on,  forgetting  that  the  high  moods 
of  victory  and  daring  come  only  on  the  invi- 
tation of  toil. 


FALLACY  OF  PREPARATION     153 

"Some  day — but  not  to-day, 
I  mean  to  put  these  trifles  all  away, 
And  arm  myself  for  manhood's  nobler  fray. 
To  throttle  wrong  and  baflEle  greed, 
And  pour  my  life  out  to  my  brother's  need, 
Some  day — ^but«not  to-day. 

"It  is  so  hard,  just  now! 
Another  time  I  shall  have  learned  just  how. 
Deliberation  will  my  speech  endow 
With  that  one  warm,  persuasive  word." 
Ah!  Hesitator,  have  you  never  heard. 
There  is  no  time  but  now? 


XXIX 

THE  CREATIVE  INFLUENCES  OF  THE 
CHURCH 

There  is  a  world  of  difference  between  the 
manifestations  of  any  movement  and  its  crea- 
tive influences.  This  would  seem  to  be  so 
obvious  a  truth  as  to  make  its  frequent  restate- 
ment superfluous  were  it  not  for  the  universal 
fact  that  the  one  is  easily  mistaken  for  the 
other.  The  person  who  is  accurately  described 
as  a  classicist  or  traditionalist  is  one  who 
makes  this  mistaken  identification  and  be- 
comes so  attentive  to  the  local  manifestations 
of  a  movement  that  he  removes  himself  from 
the  influences  which  have  created  it. 

That  was  the  mistake  of  the  Pharisees, 
whose  case  Jesus  summed  up  in  the  sentence, 
"You  make  void  the  law  through  your  tradi- 
tion.'' There  are  no  ironies  of  history  more 
striking  than  those  of  the  followers  of  great 
movements  who,  through  a  mistaken  loyalty 
to  some  of  its  temporary  forms,  make  it  stand 
for  the  very  things  against  which  it  was 
originally  launched  in  protest.    We  see  it  in 

154 


CKEATIVE  INFLUENCES  155 

the  case  of  great  political  parties,  which  began 
as  associations  of  high-spirited  innovators, 
becoming  the  bulwark  of  the  selfish  and  reac- 
tionary interests  of  the  political  world.  In 
another  sphere  we  see  it  in  some  who  would 
gladly  transform,  and  through  a  sense  of 
loyalty  too,  so  radical  a  movement  as  Meth- 
odism, which  began  as  an  uncompromising 
protest  in  the  interest  of  spiritual  freedom,  a 
daring  venturing  forth  into  new  fields,  into  a 
lifeless  code  of  ironclad  rules  and  unvarying 
customs. 

A  few  years  ago  there  was  a  gigantic  explo- 
sion of  dynamite  on  the  New  Jersey  side  of 
New  York  bay.  It  shattered  thousands  of 
windows  in  Manhattan  and  even  broke  dishes 
in  Brooklyn,  fifteen  miles  away.  All  the  fire 
engines  in  the  lower  part  of  New  York  came 
out  and  raced  helplessly  up  and  down  the 
streets  looking  for  the  cause  of  the  damage. 
They  found  plenty  of  manifestations  of  the 
explosion,  but  did  not  discover  the  cause,  for 
that  was  miles  out  of  their  reach. 

The  creative  influences  of  the  church  as 
opposed  to  the  resultant  forms  of  that  influ- 
ence are  equally  far  to  seek.  Gibbon,  in  the 
classic  chapter  in  which  he  attempts  to  explain 


156  FARES,  PLEASE! 

the  reasons  for  the  success  of  Christianity,  its 
organization,  zeal,  charity,  etc.,  only  puts  his 
hand  on  results  which  themselves  require  to 
be  accounted  for.  He  never  enters  the  realm 
of  final  causes  at  all. 

In  a  real  sense  the  final  creative  influences 
of  the  church  will  never  be  comprehended  by 
the  human  mind.  "Behold,  I  show  you  a  mys- 
tery." They  lie  buried  in  the  unsearchable 
riches  of  Christ,  the  central  mystery  of  the 
universe,  that  God  is  love.  We  never  find  the 
final  source  of  any  great  river  such  as  the 
Amazon  or  the  Mississippi  till  we  look  for 
it  in  the  clouds.  But  at  the  head  of  every 
river  there  are  certain  earthly  beginnings  in 
the  form  of  small  eternal  springs,  from  which 
the  little  stream  trickles  out  to  find  its  glori- 
ous destiny.  So,  as  one  explores  about  that 
great  seed  plot  of  modern  history,  the  book  of 
Acts,  he  discovers  definite  forces  which  were 
the  creators  of  the  church  and  under  whose 
living  influence  the  disciple  must  ever  keep 
himself. 

A  life  through  Christ  is  the  real  genius  of 
the  church,  for  which  no  knowledge,  no 
tongues,  no  gifts,  no  achievements  can  ever  be 
substituted.     The  Christian  Church  was  first 


CREATIVE  INFLUENCES         157 

of  all  a  fellowship  of  experience.  "That  which 
we  have  heard,  which  we  have  seen  with  our 
eyes,  which  we  have  looked  upon,  declare  we 
unto  you,  that  ye  also  may  have  fellowship 
with  us,  and  truly  our  fellowship  is  with  the 
Father,  and  with  his  Son  Jesus  Christ."  Here 
is  the  force  that  created — "It  is  no  longer  I 
that  live,  but  Christ  liveth  in  me."  All  the 
manifestations  of  the  church,  if  not  animated 
by  that  life-giving  force,  no  matter  what 
sacredness  usage  may  throw  around  them,  are 
sterile.  There  is  a  pathetic  little  letter  writ- 
ten by  Helen  Keller  to  Phillips  Brooks,  when 
she  was  about  twelve  years  old.  "Tell  me," 
she  says,  "something  that  you  know  about 
God."  "Something  you  know  about  God" — 
the  little  blind  girl  spoke  for  the  whole  round 
world.  As  the  same  request  was  voiced  from 
the  mission  field :  "We  do  not  want  your  adjec- 
tival Christianity;  give  us  the  substantive 
thing."  All  else  that  the  church  can  give, 
lacking  its  personal  experience,  is  sounding 
brass  and  tinkling  cymbal.  Generalization  is 
risky,  but  it  does  not  mean  much  risk  to  say 
that  the  periods  in  which  the  church  has 
moved  with  conquering  tread  have  been 
those  in  which  this  truth  of  the  active  presence 


158  FARES,  PLEASE! 

of  God  in  the  soul  have  been  emphasized ;  and 
the  epochs  when  it  has  languished  have  been 
those  in  which  this  truth  has  been  obscured. 

A  brotherhood  in  Christ,  The  book  of  Acts 
is  flooded  with  the  golden  glow^  of  the  dawning 
of  a  real  democracy  and  brotherhood  in  Christ. 
Out  of  the  scattered  and  repellent  fragments, 
one  living  body  of  Christ  was  created.  It  is 
easy  to  accept  the  brotherhood  of  man  as  a 
dead  or  blunt  truth,  but  it  never  becomes  a 
creative  force  until  we  make  earnest  with  its 
reality.  It  always  means  sacrifice.  Its  keen 
edge  which  the  world  feels  is  well  shown  in 
a  letter  which  the  Duchess  of  Buckingham 
wrote  to  Lady  Huntingdon,  regarding  White- 
field  and  Wesley:  "Their  doctrines  are  most 
repulsive  and  strongly  tinctured  with  imperti- 
nence and  disrespect  to  their  superiors.  It  is 
monstrous  to  be  told  that  you  have  a  heart  as 
sinful  as  the  common  wretches  that  crawl  the 
earth.  This  is  highly  insulting  and  I  wonder 
that  your  Ladyship  should  relish  any  senti- 
ments so  much  at  variance  with  high  rank  and 
good  breeding."  In  the  Evangelical  Revival 
of  the  eighteenth  century  England  was  re- 
created by  the  Christian  democracy  of  the  first 
century. 


CREATIVE  INFLUENCES         159 

An  urgency  for  Christ.  "When  he  had  seen 
the  vision,  immediately  he  endeavored  to  go." 
Through  whatever  changing  forms  it  mani- 
fests itself,  that  urgency  of  Paul  is  always  the 
soul  of  a  real  church.  Samuel  Johnson  paid 
a  high,  though  unintended  compliment  to  John 
Wesley:  "His  conversation  is  good,  but  he  is 
never  at  leisure.  He  always  has  to  go  at  a 
certain  hour.  This  is  very  disagreeable  to  a 
man  who  loves  to  fold  his  legs  and  have  his 
talk  out  as  I  do."  John  Wesley's  legs  were 
"unfolded"  most  of  his  ninety  years.  He  had 
felt  his  Master's  passion  for  souls  and,  like 
him,  had  not  where  to  lay  his  head.  When 
Captain  Gracie,  one  of  the  survivors  of  the 
Titanic,  died  a  year  after  the  disaster,  his 
last  words  were,  "We  must  get  them  all  into 
the  lifeboats."  That  awful  hour  of  the  im- 
manence of  danger  had  stamped  itself  on 
his  mind,  never  to  be  forgotten.  The  same 
degree  of  the  vivid  sense  of  the  destructiveness 
of  sin  and  the  urgency  of  the  good  news  of 
salvation  lay  at  the  heart  of  the  first  heralds 
of  the  cross. 


XXX 

WHICH  KINGDOM? 

There  are  some  stories,  familiar  to  the 
world  for  years,  which  yet  retain  the  dew  of 
their  youth.  One  of  these  is  the  classic  con- 
cerning the  visit  of  the  father  of  the  present 
German  emperor  to  a  little  country  school- 
house.  Conducting  an  impromptu  examina- 
tion, he  asked  a  little  girl  to  what  kingdom  a 
potato  belonged  and  received  the  right  answer 
— to  the  vegetable  kingdom.  In  the  same  way 
he  was  told  that  a  rock  belonged  to  the  min- 
eral kingdom.  Then,  pointing  to  himself  and 
asking  the  same  question,  he  was  delighted 
with  the  unexpected  response  that  he  belonged 
to  the  kingdom  of  God. 

,The  answer  was  more  correct  than  the 
"correct'^  one  would  have  been.  We  do  not 
grudge  the  repetition  of  the  old  story,  for  it 
is  one  of  those  flashes  of  spiritual  understand- 
ing sometimes  ordained  from  the  mouths  of 
babes.  But  it  deserves  far  more  than  the  ready 
and  unthinking  assent  which  we  usually  give 

160 


WHICH  KINGDOM?  161 

to  it.  It  is  always  a  pertinent  question.  After 
all,  what  kingdom  do  we  belong  to?  The  an- 
swer is  not  so  obvious  as  it  might  seem. 

When  we  look  at  the  question  in  a  fresh 
way,  that  goes  down  to  the  very  bottom  of 
the  heart,  we  realize  that  we  all  know  people 
who  seem  to  have  more  real  affinities  to  the 
vegetable  kingdom  than  to  any  other.  They 
live ;  they  grow ;  they  take  from  their  environ- 
ment things  necessary  for  their  sustenance; 
all  the  things  which  a  fine  garden  vegetable 
does — and  not  a  very  great  deal  more.  A  few 
years  ago  one  of  the  great  capitalists  of 
America  died,  a  man  known  to  the  public 
mainly  by  three  facts:  he  was  worth  more 
than  fifty  million  dollars,  he  had  never  taken 
a  vacation,  and  he  lunched  every  day  on  an 
apple.  One  of  the  New  York  dailies,  com- 
menting on  his  career,  said  that  he  had  prob- 
ably gotten  as  much  enjoyment  out  of  life  as 
a  healthy  vegetable.  Which  comment,  while 
flavored  with  witty  exaggeration,  was  headed 
in  the  direction  of  truth.  Queen  Elizabeth 
once  asked  the  secretary  of  the  House  of  Com- 
mons what  passed  during  the  session.  He 
answered,  wearily,  "Seven  weeks."  To  spend 
life  merely  in  passing  the  time,  however  pleas- 


162  FARES,  PLEASE! 

antly,  is  truly  called  "vegetating/'  Such  life 
has  no  returns  from  ventures  of  thought  or 
investments  of  action.  It  goes  "from  thought- 
less youth  to  ruminating  age."  Somewhere 
along  in  its  latter  half  it  always  meets  that 
very  real  tragedy  which  occurs  when  life  takes 
on  a  dwindling  aspect.  Sydney  Smith  put 
it  gTimly  when  he  said  of  a  friend,  "He  spent 
all  his  life  letting  down  empty  buckets  into 
empty  wells,  and  now  he  is  frittering  away 
his  age  trying  to  draw  them  up  again." 

The  brightest  silver  lining  to  the  clouds  of 
sorrow  is  the  truth  that  God  uses  pain  and 
misfortune  to  awaken  us  to  a  higher  kingdom. 
Sorrow  is  usually  his  call,  "Friend,  come  up 
higher."  "I  learn  day  by  day,"  wrote  Steven- 
son, on  a  sick  bed,  "the  value  and  high  doc- 
trinality  of  suffering.  Let  me  suffer  always; 
not  more  than  I  can  bear,  for  that  drives  men 
mad ;  but  still  to  suffer  some,  and  never  to  sink 
to  the  eyes  in  comfort  and  respectability." 
How  many  life  histories  are  summed  up  in 
these  words  of  Harriet  Martineau:  "But  for 
the  loss  of  our  father's  money,  we  might  have 
lived  on  in  the  ordinary  provincial  method  of 
ladies  with  small  means,  growing  narrower 
every  year;  whereas,  by  being  thrown  on  our 


WHICH  KINGDOM?  163 

resources  while  it  was  yet  time,  we  have 
worked  hard  and  usefully,  won  friends  and 
independence,  seen  the  world  abundantly 
abroad  and  at  home,  in  short,  have  truly  lived 
instead  of  vegetating.'' 

Sometimes  again  men  become  so  hard  by  the 
scramble  of  competition,  so  capable  of  resist- 
ing impression  made  by  anything  less  soft  and 
metallic  than  a  coin,  that  they  seem  almost  to 
belong  to  the  mineral  kingdom.  They  have  the 
undeniable  power  of  making  their  way  that  a 
bullet  has  and  the  same  unyielding  quality. 
It  is  a  good  thing  on  occasion  to  stand  like  a 
rock ;  it  is  a  sad  thing  to  become  one. 

We  all  belong  to  the  animal  kingdom^  and 
it  is  not  only  a  worthy  ambition  but  a  God- 
given  duty  to  become  the  best  animal  of  which 
we  are  capable.  But  it  is  a  poor  stopping 
point.  On  leaving  a  famous  health  resort  in 
Germany  a  grateful  patient  wrote  in  the  guest 
book. 

Content  return  I  from  this  blessed  wood. 

I  found  here  health,  life's  highest,  truest,  good. 

But  a  wiser  man  wrote  beneath  the  lines : 

That  is  not  life's  best  good.    That  is  but  half. 
Else  were  most  blest  a  healthy  little  calf. 


164  FARES,  PLEASE! 

Once  when  Tennyson  was  looking  at  a  portrait 
of  a  retired  politician  in  his  bland  family 
aspect  he  made  the  observation,  "He  looks  like 
a  retired  panther."  There  are  some  politicians 
to  whom  such  assignment  to  the  animal  king- 
dom would  have  had  more  truth  than  simile. 

In  the  kingdom  of  God  every  man,  emperor 
and  peasant,  millionaire  and  clerk,  belongs. 
"God  is  a  Spirit,  and  those  who  worship  him 
must  worship  in  spirit  and  in  truth,"  has  its 
corollary  in  the  truth  that  man  is  a  spirit,  and 
only  in  the  fellowship  of  his  Father's  life  and 
purpose  does  he  find  his  true  sphere. 

For  what  are  men  better  than  sheep  or  goats 
That  nourish  a  blind  life  within  the  brain. 
If,  knowing  God,  they  lift  not  hands  of  prayer 
Both  for  themselves  and  those  who  call  them  friend? 
For  so  the  whole  round  earth  is  every  way 
Bound  by  gold  chains  about  the  feet  of  God. 

The  world  of  nature  knows  two  kinds  of  forces 
— the  gravitant  forces,  such  as  gravitation, 
and  the  radiant  forces,  such  as  electricity  and 
radium.  The  man  who  belongs  to  the  kingdom 
of  God  holds  the  gravitant  forces  of  his  life, 
its  acquisitive  and  accumulative  powers,  under 
the  domination  of  the  radiant  forces  of  love 
and  service. 


XXXI 

"A  MAXIM  SILENCER  FOR  OLD 
WHEEZES'' 

"A  Maxim  Silencer  for  Old  Wheezes"  is 
the  sparkling  title  of  a  recent  article  in  the 
Atlantic  Monthly.  In  it  Mr.  Seymour  Deming 
gives  us  a  list  of  soft  and  silencing  answers 
with  which  to  drown  the  endless  and  tiresome 
repetition  of  old  worn  out  saws,  particularly 
those  that  have  to  do  with  the  economic  and 
social  questions.  It  would  be  a  fine  thing  if 
we  could  have  a  similarly  effective  means  pre- 
sented for  killing  off  the  crystallized  lies 
which  masquerade  as  gems  of  thought  in  the 
moral  and  religious  world.  We  are  told  in 
the  New  Testament  to  "try  the  prophets"  be- 
fore following  them ;  and  in  this  modern  world 
it  is  just  as  well  to  "try"  the  epigrams  as  well. 
For  the  power  for  evil  which  is  carried  by  a 
crisp  looking  popular  epigram  is  unreckon- 
able.  By  dint  of  endless  repetition  they  get 
themselves  believed  among  those  who  never 
challenge  them,  and  by  implying  far  more 


166  FAEES,  PLEASE! 

than  they  assert  they  act  as  paralysis  on 
action. 

Hardly  a  day  passes  on  which  we  are  not 
informed  that  ^Ht  takes  all  kinds  of  people  to 
make  a  worldJ'  The  trite  saying  is  usually  let 
drop  with  an  air  of  having  made  a  fresh  contri- 
bution to  the  world's  wisdom.  This  choice 
remark  was  given  a  high  place  in  Gelett  Bur- 
gess's celebrated  list  of  "bromides"  and  with 
reason.  Hardly  any  other  piece  of  conversa- 
tional small  change  is  circulated  with  more 
frequency  by  the  mentally  indolent.  It  con- 
tains this  much  truth — that  there  are  all  kinds 
of  people  in  the  world,  and,  more  than  that, 
it  takes  different  kinds  of  people  to  make  an 
interesting  world.  But  the  "epigram"  raises 
a  mental  fog  which  obscures  moral  distinc- 
tions. It  apologizes  for  delinquencies  as 
though  honest  men  and  thieves  were  as  inevita- 
ble classes  of  men  as  short  men  and  tall.  This 
fog  of  shallow  thinking  is  shown  in  the  great 
popularity  of  this  flabby  quatrain,  so  often 
used  as  a  wall  motto : 

There's  so  much  bad  in  the  best  of  us. 
And  so  much  good  in  the  worst  of  us. 
That  it  doesn't  become  any  of  us 
To  talk  about  the  rest  of  us. 


"A  MAXIM  SILENCER"  167 

With  the  evil  of  gossiping  we  can  all  hasten 
to  heartily  agree.  But  the  logical  effect  of  the 
whole  is  to  question  seriously  the  value  of 
moral  effort  and  ends  in  the  creeping  paralysis 
of  "What's  the  use?"  The  truth  is,  of  course, 
that  it  takes  only  one  kind  of  people  to  make 
the  right  kind  of  a  world — the  people  whose 
lives  under  all  varieties  of  temperament  and 
circumstances  are  forces  in  establishing  the 
kingdom  of  God. 

If  this  lie  has  slain  its  thousands,  its  first 
cousin,  ^^Ifs  not  what  you  believe  hut  what 
you  do  that  counts/^  has  slain  its  ten  thou- 
sands. For  through  the  medium  of  the  post- 
card, the  anaemic  poetry  of  the  daily  press, 
and  the  thoughtless  turning  of  human  phono- 
graphs, this  sentiment  of  the  uselessness  of 
belief  has  grown  quite  imposing  and  substan- 
tial. It  has  this  coating  of  truth,  of  course, 
that  an  effectual  belief  always  fulfills  itself  in 
deeds.  But  in  the  sense  in  which  it  is  most 
widely  quoted  it  contains  as  much  wisdom  as 
to  say,  "It  doesn't  make  any  difference  what 
a  farmer  plants,  it's  what  he  grows  that 
counts."  This  philosophy  speaks  daily  to 
thousands  in  the  following  sweet  and  sickly 
lines : 


168  FAEES,  PJLEASE! 

So  many  paths,  so  many  creeds, 
So  many  words  that  wind  and  wind; 

When  all  the  poor  old  world  needs 
Is  just  the  art  of  being  kind. 

How  simple !  The  verse  would  lead  us  to  sup- 
pose that  the  art  of  being  kind  werie  the  most 
trifling  matter  in  the  world.  There  could  not 
be  a  greater  fallacy.  The  art  of  being  persist- 
ently and  intelligently  kind  is  the  most  tre- 
mendous task  to  which  the  race  ever  set  itself. 
We  would  stamp  as  an  idiot  the  man  who 
would  muse,  "So  many  clouds,  so  many  rains, 
so  many  useless  things  in  earth  and  sky,  when 
all  the  world  needs  is  more  corn  and  wheat." 
To  grow  a  stalk  of  wheat  calls  for  the  cosmic 
energies  of  the  universe.  And  a  life  of  effec- 
tive kindness,  in  the  same  way,  demands  an 
endurance  of  will  and  loftiness  of  motive 
which  will  not  grow  in  the  top  soil  of  senti- 
mentalism  but  require  a  real  and  rational  faith 
in  God. 

Another  old  saw  which  carries  the  terrify- 
ing club  of  an  axiom  is  that  valiant  retainer 
of  the  liquor  traffic  and  every  interest  that 
preys  on  men,  ^^You  can't  change  human 
nature/'  Many  folks,  who  would  scorn  to 
allow  themselves  to  be  browbeaten  by  a  human 


"A  MAXIM  SILENCER'^  169 

bully  with  a  club,  will  meekly  surrender  when 
this  blustering  bit  of  nonsense  appears.  It  is 
nonsense  because  it  begs  the  whole  question 
by  assuming  that  human  nature  is  a  rigid, 
static  thing  in  which  the  ignorance,  the  vices, 
and  follies  of  men  were  ineradicably  set. 
Human  nature  is  a  dynamic,  living,  gi'owing 
thing,  and  "it  doth  not  yet  appear  what  we 
shall  be."  We  cannot  change  an  acorn,  but 
we  can  mercilessly  destroy  conditions  which 
forbid  its  development  into  the  mighty,  normal 
oak.  Which  is  just  what  every  effort  for  the 
betterment  of  humanity  aims  to  do. 

Saint  Paul  gave  the  advice  in  the  first  cen- 
tury, to  "shun  old  wives'  fables."  If  he  were 
here  to-day,  he  would  surely  let  it  stand. 


XXXII 
PILGRIM'S  PROGRESS— REVISED 

Among  the  curiosities  of  literature  is  Ben- 
jamin Franklin's  revision  of  the  Lord's 
Prayer.  The  same  ignominious  fate  which  was 
met  by  Franklin's  attempt  at  improvement 
awaits  anyone  who  would  have  the  imperti- 
nence to  lay  a  revising  hand  on  Pilgrim's  Prog- 
ress. The  book's  timeless  place  is  secured,  if 
on  no  other  score,  by  the  approval  of  a  timeless 
childhood.  It  has  been  a  spring,  never  dry  or 
intermitent,  both  of  good  diction  and  good 
deeds. 

Accordingly,  we  have  not  the  rashness  of 
offering  any  revision  of  our  own  time.  We 
venture  only  to  suggest  a  revision  which  pre- 
ceded the  original  work  by  some  centuries,  as 
a  sort  of  preliminary  footnote. 

The  one  defect  of  Bunyan's  immortal  record 
for  our  day  is  its  lack  of  social  outlook.  The 
story  of  one  lone  man  battling  his  way  from 
the  City  of  Destruction  to  the  Celestial  City, 
however  heroic  it  may  be,  is  always  a  frag- 

170 


PILGRIM^S  PEOGRESS  171 

ment.  If  Ms  solitary  victory  is  all  that  is 
achieved,  we  may  well  ask,  from  the  point  of 
view  of  future  pilgrims, 

"But  what  good  came  of  it  at  last?" 

Quoth  little  Peterkin. 
"Why,  that  I  cannot  tell,"  said  he; 
"But  'twas  a  famous  victory." 

After  Pilgrim  comes  his  wife,  in  the  less 
known  sequel,  along  the  same  way,  to  find  not 
a  stone  rolled  aside,  bridge  built,  or  forest 
cleared.  It  is  a  better  Pilgrim's  Progress 
which  is  suggested  in  the  book  of  Proverbs, 
"The  path  of  the  righteous  is  made  a  high- 
way.'' The  ideal  of  a  man  who  not  only  gets 
there  himself,  but  who,  as  he  goes,  builds  a 
road,  levels  a  hill,  is  infinitely  larger.  Such 
an  ideal  brings  to  the  detached  romance  of  the 
adventurer  the  social  service  of  the  pioneer. 
The  figure  comes  from  the  thought  that  the 
desert  road  on  which  the  caravan  moves  with 
safety  and  ease  was  once  the  lonely  hazard  of 
one  man  over  the  uncharted  waste. 

Every  broad  highway  on  which  we  move 
was  once  a  foot  path.  Out  in  Penn  Valley 
Park,  in  Kansas  City,  beside  the  track  of  the 
Santa  Fe  Railroad,  is  a  monument  which 
marks  the  course  of  the  old  Santa  Fe  trail — 


172  FARES,  PLEASE! 

a  mute  but  eloquent  commentary  on  this  truth. 
It  is  a  tonic  to  the  spirit  to  think  of  the  great 
steel  highway,  along  which  international  traffic 
plunges  at  the  rate  of  fifty  miles  an  hour,  being 
once  the  daring  and  solitary  wheel  print  of  a 
"prairie  schooner."  It  is  true  of  the  highway 
of  the  spirit  as  well.  It  is  hard  for  us  to  im- 
agine the  time  when  liberty  of  conscience  and 
speech  was  a  new  and  daring  heresy. 

If  every  road  was  once  a  path,  the  converse 
is  equally  true,  that  every  path  becomes  a 
road,  and  therein  lies  the  inspiration  for  to- 
day's pilgrim.  Glance  swiftly  at  some  of  the 
stations  passed  by  Bunyan's  wayfarer,  and 
notice  how  their  bleak  outlines  blossom  as  the 
rose  to  the  real  life  pilgrim  who  builds  as  he 
goes. 

Hill  Difficulty  is  on  every  path.  The  mag- 
netism which  there  is  in  the  mere  hope  of 
getting  to  the  top  is  often  too  weak  to  urge 
on  a  heart  that  is  heavier  than  lead.  But  add 
the  prospect  of  laying  a  pavement,  of  driving 
a  stake  for  the  next  man  to  pull  up  by,  and  it 
is  a  new  road.  It  is  just  as  hard,  perhaps,  but 
a  lot  more  worth  while.  Christ  began  with 
the  hill  path.  That  new  and  living  way  by 
which  we  easily  go  to  the  heart  of  God  was 


PILGRIM'S  PROGRESS  173 

first  laid  out  by  forty  days  of  hard  journeying 
in  the  wilderness  of  temptation.  He  made  a 
Pilgrim's  Progress  for  the  hope  which  was  set 
before  him.  He  was  strong  to  save  because  he 
was  strong  to  suffer.  It  is  always  true.  By 
the  development  of  our  own  strength  to  serve, 
by  our  addition  to  the  world's  stock  of  hill- 
reducing  examples,  we  lay  paving  stones  on 
every  hill  we  ascend. 

Doubting  Castle  is  less  of  a  grim  dungeon 
viewed  in  this  light.  Phillips  Brooks  says 
that  very  few  men  have  helped  others  by  a 
direct  solving  of  their  doubts,  but  that  an 
innumerable  company  have  made  a  way  out  of 
doubt  for  others  by  showing  them  the  spectacle 
of  one  holding  true  his  course  of  life  when  it 
was  known  that  all  doubts  were  not  at  rest. 
Tennyson  was  overwhelmed  on  his  eightieth 
birthday  by  the  expressions  of  love  that  came 
in  from  all  parts  of  the  world.  "I  do  not  know 
what  I  have  done,"  he  said,  "that  so  many 
people  should  feel  grateful  to  me  except  that 
I  have  always  kept  my  faith  in  immortality." 
What  an  "all"  it  was!  The  stanzas  of  "In 
Memoriam"  loom  up  like  the  girders  of  a 
great  bridge  from  doubt  to  faith  which  has 
furnished  sure  footing  for  thousands. 


174  FARES,  PLEASE! 

Even  the  Slough  of  Despond  grows  its 
flowers.  The  noblest  tribute  ever  paid  to  Pitt, 
finer  than  any  that  Macaulay  or  Leeky  ever 
penned,  was  the  remark  of  an  infantry  cap- 
tain. "No  one,"  he  said,  "ever  went  into  his 
closet  without  coming  out  a  braver  man."  The 
spectacle  of  Pitt  making  his  way  through 
Herculean  tasks  helped  the  soldier  to  face  his 
own.  Out  of  his  own  hard  path  Pitt  made  a 
common  highway  for  the  spirit  of  the  nation. 

Pioneer  days  in  our  national  development 
exist  only  in  books  and  memory.  But  in  the 
religious  and  moral  life  road-building  days 
never  pass  away.  Wherever  men  and  women 
are  bravely  meeting  their  own  difficulties  and 
conquering  them  we  can  hear  the  crash  of  the 
ax  of  the  pioneer. 


XXXIII 
WASHING  THE  AIR 

In  nearly  every  large  city  hospital  there  will 
be  found  a  device  for  the  startling  but  useful 
purpose  of  "washing  the  air."  It  is  a  jarlike 
receptacle  which  may  be  attached  to  any  win- 
dow, and  through  which  the  air  is  forced 
through  water  for  purification,  and  set  in  mo- 
tion by  a  fan.  It  catches  the  outdoor  breezes, 
gives  them  a  thorough  shampoo,  and  dispenses 
them  for  needy  nostrils.  Even  when  the  hos- 
pital is  environed  with  a  forest  of  smoke 
stacks,  the  air  can  be  "washed'^  for  safe  and 
healing  use. 

The  modest  little  jar  at  the  hospital  window 
is  a  graphic  picture  of  the  function  of  prayer 
in  a  life  set  against  a  grim  and  dusty  back- 
ground. There  is  no  theater  of  an  active,  busy 
life  whose  atmosphere  does  not  hold  in  solu- 
tion dust  and  dirt  that  lodges  in  the  mind  and 
heart,  obscuring  vision  and  lowering  vitality. 
Aims,  standards,  and  practices  not  our  own 
will  lodge  in  the  mind  as  surely  as  dust  in  the 

175 


176  FARES,  PLEASE! 

lungs,  unless  the  air  we  move  in  is  continually 
charged  with  new  life.  The  mediaeval  solution 
of  this  problem  was  to  go  where  the  air  was 
free  from  contagious  dust,  necessarily  arising 
from  an  evil  world.  The  Christian  solution  is 
not  to  flee  from  the  air,  but  to  wash  it ;  to  pass 
it  through  what  has  been  finely  called  the  great 
alembic  of  God's  will  in  prayer  and  to  renew 
it  through  the  transformation  of  the  mind  as 
a  heart  is  lifted  up  into  a  new  world  and 
new  air. 

It  is  also  true  that  the  largest  part  of  our 
service  for  others  is  the  indirect  one  of  clear- 
ing the  atmosphere,  "washing  the  air''  in 
which  they  live,  furnishing  a  medium  in  which 
their  best  may  spontaneously  spring  up.  The 
direct  and  immediate  benefits  we  are  able  to 
give  are  largely  confined  to  cases  of  excep- 
tional intimacy,  or  a  rare  endowment  of  wis- 
dom or  means.  We  cannot  assume  direct 
charge  or  responsibility  of  another  and  expect 
to  do  much  service  by  infallible  advice  or 
repeated  exhortation.  Such  an  attitude  re- 
sembles too  closely  the  one  who  would  say,  "I 
am  Sir  Oracle,  and  when  I  ope  my  lips  let  no 
dog  bark!"  We  do  most  when  our  attitude 
and  temperament  induce  a  response,  as  pure 


WASHING  THE  AIR  177 

air,  without  alluding  to  its  presence  or  pur- 
pose, builds  up  tissue. 

Attach  your  spiritual  device  for  washing  the 
air  to  the  window  of  a  room  which  is  full  of 
strife,  and  what  a  new  current  circles  through ! 
"A  soft  answer  turneth  away  wrath."  It 
brings  to  the  atmosphere  an  oxidation  which 
is  death  to  the  germ  of  strife.  Lincoln  had  in 
his  large  and  generous  personality  such  a 
faculty,  without  which  his  best  work  would 
have  remained  undone.  "Do  you  know,"  asks 
an  irate  partisan,  bursting  in  on  him,  "that  the 
Secretary  of  War  called  you  a  blamed  fool?" 
"Well,"  comes  the  unruffled  answer,  "Stanton 
is  generally  right."  Such  a  spirit  is  like  open- 
ing a  door  in  a  close  room  and  allowing  a  cool 
breeze  to  sweep  through.  It  enables  a  stifled 
self-control  and  judgment  to  breathe  anew. 

For  how  truly  great  a  genius  is  another  role, 
that  of  comforter  in  sorrow,  cast !  Rarely  does 
the  word  sent  out  in  direct  treatment  ever 
come  within  sight  of  its  mark.  Our  most  sin- 
cere word  often  "thrusts  a  bungling  hand  amid 
the  heartstrings  of  a  friend."  The  offering  of 
the  truest  philosophy  and  citation  of  Scripture 
leave  the  air  still  close.  The  error  we  often 
make  is  to  assume  that  we  can  by  any  effort 


178  FARES,  PLEASE! 

heal  the  wound  directly.  God  and  his  great 
almoner  Time  alone  can  do  that.  But  to  be 
present  with  a  quiet  and  steady  affection 
which  takes  itself  for  granted  is  to  pass  the 
heavy  atmosphere  weighing  down  on  our 
friend  through  the  medium  of  a  sympathetic 
friendship,  and  so  give  it  new  life. 

But  the  most  frequent  contribution  which 
we  can  make  to  the  air  which  others  breathe  is 
that  which  fills  it  with  the  oxygen  of  incentive. 
How  quickly  one  transported  from  the  East 
Side  of  New  York  responds  to  the  pines  of  the 
Adirondacks.  The  great  danger  which  the 
newcomer  to  Colorado  runs  is  that  he  will 
work  himself  beyond  his  strength  in  a  few 
weeks.  There  is  an  exhilaration  in  the  air 
which  makes  for  work — a  freshness  and  a  zest, 
from  which  all  germs  of  "the  sleeping  sick- 
ness" have  been  effectually  sponged  out.  It 
has  the  same  effect  which  a  high  and  resolute 
attitude  to  life  carries  with  it  wherever  it 
appears.  "Beauty  and  rhythm,"  says  Plato, 
in  a  noble  apology  for  art,  "find  their  way  into 
the  secret  places  of  the  soul."  So  does  every 
kind  of  noble  activity  tend  to  create  its  repro- 
duction, not  as  a  mechanical  replica  but  as  a 
native  growth. 


WASHING  THE  AIR  179 

In  the  first  story  published  by  the  late  O. 
Henry  there  is  a  young  shop  girl  who  keeps 
a  picture  of  Lord  Kitchener  on  her  table,  not 
having  the  least  idea  who  he  was,  because  he 
had  a  "stern  face."  It  was  stern  enough,  at 
any  rate,  to  tide  her  over,  by  implied  disap- 
proval, the  temptation  of  the  one  night  with 
which  the  author's  sobering  story  concerns 
itself.  It  is  not  overdrawn.  The  fine  and 
noble  face  of  Frederick  W.  Robertson  has 
hung  over  the  desk  of  more  than  one  man, 
through  the  months  and  years,  washing  the  air 
clean  of  low  aims  and  mean  desires. 

One  thing  about  this  device  merits  atten- 
tion. It  is  a  power  plant.  It  calls  for  fuel, 
energy,  sacrifice.  Purifying  air  concerns  itself 
Tvdth  such  concrete  things  as  coal,  steam, 
dynamos.  It  is  never  passive.  'This  indirect 
method  of  service  is  not,  therefore,  easy.  It 
must  be,  not  the  sporadic  effort  of  an  hour 
but  the  massed  impression  of  a  life.  That 
which  sustains  life  comes  from  a  life  which 
is  itself  a  sustained  effort. 


XXXIV 

"AT  YOUR  PERIL!" 

"We  get  our  bread  at  the  peril  of  our  lives," 
ran  the  testimony  of  the  author  of  the  book  of 
Lamentations,  vividly  picturing  the  uncertain- 
ties of  life  in  the  conquered  and  desolate  Jeru- 
salem. We  may  well  render  thanks  that  the 
lines  are  fallen  to  us  in  pleasant  places  where 
we  can  win  a  livelihood  without  the  risk  of 
life  itself.  Render  thanks,  that  is,  if  in  doing 
so  we  do  not  forget  that  we  have  still  a  long 
way  to  go  in  reducing  the  physical  peril  of 
life.  Kor  need  we  go  to  Europe  for  examples. 
There  are  too  many  thousand  preventable  acci- 
dents in  our  own  land  that  still  make  timely 
the  bitter  cry  of  Thomas  Hood,  fifty  years  ago : 

O  God,  that  bread  should  be  so  dear 
And  flesh  and  blood  so  cheap! 

A  brilliant  inventor  has  given  this  testimony : 
"If  I  can  produce  a  device  to  save  time,  I  can 
dispose  of  it  in  twenty  places;  but  if  I  offer 
an  idea  for  saving  life,  I  can  hardly  dispose 

180 


"AT  YOUR  PERIL!"  181 

of  it  at  all.''  Time  is  money,  but  a  man  is 
easily  replaced. 

Yet  no  matter  how  safe  industry  and  travel 
may  become  in  the  future  years,  the  old  word 
of  Lamentations  will  always  be  true  of  the 
spiritual  life.  We  will  always  get  our  bread 
at  the  risk  of  having  the  process  deaden  our 
spiritual  aspiration  and  hunger.  On  the  gates 
at  the  entrance  to  every  occupation  and  pro- 
fession, there  is  written  "At  Your  Peril !"  To 
say  that  is  not  to  chant  a  wail  over  work. 
Without  labor  the  finest  faculties  of  the  soul 
would  sicken  and  droop.  Yet,  with  all  the 
benefits  which  follow  the  concentrated  pursuit 
of  an  occupation,  it  holds  perils  as  real  as  did 
the  forests  where  our  ancestors  hunted  game 
for  food. 

In  the  mere  fact  of  routine,  so  large  a  part 
of  our  daily  toil,  there  lies  the  constant  menace 
to  the  mind  and  heart  of  life  becoming  an 
uninspiring  drag.  Constantly  thinking  and 
working  in  any  groove  holds  the  danger  of 
blunting  the  sensibilities  to  all  that  lies  out- 
side of  that  groove.  "Tell  me  about  Spain, 
romantic  Spain,"  asked  a  friend  of  an  auto- 
mobile tourist.  "Well,"  he  replied,  "down  in 
the  valleys  the  roads  are  pretty  good,  but  up 


182  FARES,  PLEASE! 

in  the  hill  they  are  awful."  Spain  meant 
nothing  but  roads  to  him.  With  his  eyes  glued 
to  the  ruts,  he  missed  entirely  the  face  of  the 
fields  and  the  face  of  man.  "Born  a  man,  died 
a  grocer,''  is  often  a  true  epitaph.  Nor  does 
the  mere  kind  of  routine  make  very  much 
difference.  Even  so  glorious  a  thing  as  preach- 
ing may  be  allowed  to  become  an  unspiritual 
drag.  The  tendency  is  to  strike  a  level  and 
strike  it  so  low  as  to  leave  out  all  high  aspira- 
tions and  endeavors. 

There  is  the  lifelong  peril  of  the  means  be- 
coming the  end.  Like  the  dyer's  hand  the 
mind  becomes  subdued  to  what  it  works  in, 
and  the  final  purpose  of  life  is  forgotten  in  the 
process  of  sustaining  and  furnishing  it.  The 
number  of  things  lost  in  a  large  city  in  the 
course  of  a  year  is  amazing.  The  London 
police  office  handles  over  one  hundred  thou- 
sand lost  articles  every  year.  But  what  a 
much  more  appalling  tale  would  be  the  story 
of  those  finer  lost  things  which  are  never  re- 
ported and  often  not  even  detected — ^ideals 
slipped  away,  purposes  pared  down,  and  aims 
beclouded !  When  the  means  becomes  the  end 
the  world  becomes  a  landscape  without  a  sky. 

Let  him  who  thinks  he  has  escaped  in  his 


"At  YOUR  PERIL!''  183 

money-getting  the  peril  of  covetousness  and 
avarice  thank  God ;  then  let  him  hasten  to  take 
heed  lest  he  fall.  There  is  much  food  for 
thought  in  the  statement  of  a  priest  that  he 
had  every  conceivable  fault  confessed  to  him 
except  one — that  of  penury  and  stinginess.  A 
great  artist  has  given  on  canvas  his  concep- 
tion of  avarice  as  having  the  forepart  of  the 
body  like  a  dragon  and  the  rear  part  like  a 
shapeless  iceberg.  It  is  his  portrayal  of  the 
truth  that  the  approach  of  avarice  freezes 
every  fine  enthusiasm  and  generous  movement 
of  the  heart.  Other  vices  spoil  different  as- 
pects of  life ;  this  one  chills  it  at  the  center. 

Against  these  perils  which  do  not  appear 
on  Saint  Paul's  notable  list — perils  of  the 
counter,  perils  of  the  office,  perils  of  the  street 
— there  is  only  one  remedy,  a  very  hard  and 
heroic  one:  "Watch  and  pray."  Thread  your 
routine  with  the  nobler  quest  of  the  Kingdom, 
supplement  the  contacts  of  the  market  place 
with  the  companionship  of  the  King,  and  you 
will  go  unscathed  by  the  Pestilence  that 
walketh  at  noonday. 


XXXV 

EVERYTHING  UPSIDE  DOWN 

In  the  aisle  of  a  large  department  store  the 
week  before  Christmas,  a  lady  who  looked  like 
an  animated  Christmas  tree,  with  packages 
dangling  from  each  arm,  and  a  gentleman  who 
was  looking  the  other  way,  were  demonstrat- 
ing to  the  complete  satisfaction  of  the  on- 
lookers the  incontestable  theorem  that  two 
bodies  cannot  occupy  the  same  space  at  the 
same  time.  There  was  a  disastrous  collision 
and  the  packages  flew  in  four  directions.  As 
the  man  stooped  to  pick  up  the  packages,  the 
woman  gave  relief  to  her  feelings :  "O,  I  hate 
Christmas,  anyhow!  It  turns  everything  up- 
side down!"  It  was. on  the  tip  of  the  man's 
tongue  to  say,  "Why,  that  is  just  what  it  is 
made  for,"  but  there  was  a  weather  signal  in 
the  look  in  her  eye  which  told  him  that  the 
hour  was  not  propitious  for  such  philosophiz- 
ing, so  he  lifted  his  hat  and  passed  on.  But  he 
always  felt  grateful  to  her  for  the  deep  though 
unconscious  wisdom  of  her  remark. 

184 


UPSIDE  DOWN  185 

There  is  far-reaching  appropriateness  in  the 
fact  that  the  world's  immortal  baby  story, 
that  of  Bethlehem,  should  be  a  story  of  turn- 
ing things  upside  down — for  that  is  a  baby's 
chief  business.  It  is  a  gross  slander  on  babies 
that  their  chief  passion  is  food.  It  is  re- 
arrangement. Every  orthodox  baby  rearranges 
all  that  he  sees,  from  the  order  of  importance 
in  the  family  to  the  bric-a-brac  and  window 
curtains.  The  advent  of  every  baby  completely 
upsets  his  little  world,  both  physically  and 
spiritually.  And  it  is  not  one  of  the  smallest 
values  of  the  fact  that  the  Saviour  of  the 
world  came  into  it  as  a  baby,  that  it  reminds 
men  that  every  baby  is  born  a  savior,  to  some 
extent,  from  selfishness  and  greed  and  sin  in 
the  little  circle  which  his  advent  blesses. 

Christmas  turns  everything  upside  down. 
This  is  the  central  truth  of  the  incarnation — 
"Immanuel,  God  with  us."  The  upside  of 
heaven  come  down  to  earth.  "The  Word  was 
made  flesh,  and  dwelt  among  us,  and  we  be- 
held his  glory,  .  .  .  full  of  grace  and  truth." 
Men  miss  the  entire  meaning  of  Jesus  when 
they  see  in  him  the  highest  upreach  of  man; 
he  is  God  reaching  down  and  making  common 
cause  with  man's  struggle.     The  meaning  of 


186  FAEES,  PLEASE! 

Christmas  puts  down  the  mighty  things  in 
men's  minds  from  their  seats — place,  riches, 
talents — and  exalts  the  things  of  low  degree — 
humility,  simplicity,  and  trust.  Charles  Lamb, 
in  one  of  his  most  delightful  essays,  sets  high 
worth  on  the  observance  of  All  Fools'  Day, 
because  it  says  to  a  man:  "You  look  wise. 
Pray  correct  that  error!"  Christmas  brings 
the  universal  message  to  men:  "You  look  im- 
portant and  great;  pray  correct  that  error." 
It  overturns  the  false  standards  that  have 
blinded  the  vision  and  sets  up  again  in  their 
rightful  magnitude  those  childlike  qualities 
by  which  we  enter  the  Kingdom. 

Christmas  turns  things  inside  out.  Under 
the  spell  of  the  Christmas  story  the  locked  up 
treasures  of  kindliness  and  sympathy  come 
from  the  inside  of  the  heart,  where  they  are 
often  kept  imprisoned,  to  the  outside  of  actual 
expression  in  deed  and  word.  We  read  of  the 
visit  of  the  Wise  Men,  that  when  they  saw  the 
Child  they  unlocked  the  chest  and  took  out 
their  gifts.  It  is  the  vision  of  the  Christ-child 
which  enables  all  men  to  get  at  the  best  treas- 
ures of  their  lives  and  offer  them  for  use. 

Christmas  turns  things  last  end  foremost. 
The  people  whom  the  world  arranges  last  in 


UPSIDE  DOWN  187 

its  procession — the  weary,  the  poor,  the 
foolish,  the  lame,  the  halt,  the  blind — these  are 
the  ones  who  come  at  the  very  head  of  the 
column  in  the  consideration  of  the  Little  Child 
who  leads.  The  last,  the  least,  the  lost — how 
often  those  words  were  on  Jesus's  lips — the 
three  great  objects  of  his  passion!  It  is  not 
the  world^s  idea  of  correct  form.  Here  is  the 
order  of  seating  on  an  old  New  England 
Church,  as  preserved  in  its  records:  "First, 
dignity  of  descent;  second,  place  of  public 
trust;  third,  pious  disposition;  fourth,  estate; 
last  (and  least  no  doubt!)  peculiar  service- 
ableness  of  any  kind."  What  a  commentary 
on  the  New  Testament!  And  yet  most  of  us 
unconsciously  arrange  our  acquaintances  or 
possible  acquaintances  in  the  order  of  what 
advantage  they  may  be  to  us.  Jesus  reverses 
the  whole  scheme  as  a  perversion  and  sets  up 
a  new  basis  of  classification.  His  question  is 
not,  What  can  this  man  do  for  me?  but  What 
can  I  do  for  him?  The  most  important  person 
for  us  to  know,  he  tells  us  both  by  word  and 
example,  is  the  one  who  needs  us  most.  "The 
first  shall  be  last  and  the  last  shall  be  first." 


XXXVI 

GETTING  ALL  RUN  DOWN 

In  the  spring  a  fuller  crimson  comes  upon  the  robin's 

breast; 
In  the  spring  the  wanton  lapwing  gets  himself  another 

crest. 

In  the  spring  also  the  barns  along  the 
country  roadside  begin  to  burgeon  with  large 
and  gaudily  painted  enticements  to  buy  Jones' 
Sarsaparilla  or  Smith's  Elixir  of  Life  for 
"that  run-down  feeling."  They  are  worded 
so  alluringly  that  if  we  had  not  noticed  the 
symptoms  before,  we  are  almost  persuaded 
when  we  finish  that  we  are  pretty  much  "run 
down." 

"Getting  all  run  down"  seems  to  be  quite 
popular,  particularly  among  those  classes 
which  can  afford  it.  Nervous  exhaustion  in 
all  its  various  forms  has  appeared  so  often 
that  it  has  been  deemed  worthy  of  a  name  all 
of  its  own — "Americanitis."  It  is  usually  a 
partial  product  of  that  ubiquitous  and  iniqui- 
tous trinity,  hurry,  worry,  and  jar.    And  for  a 

188 


GETTING  ALL  RUN  DOWN       189 

long  time  it  had  elevated  the  Spring  Tonic 
into  the  dignity  and  proportion  of  a  national 
movement.  But  as  a  nation  we  are  fortunately 
getting  over  the  drug  habit.  The  advertise- 
ment is  no  longer  our  chief  guide,  philosopher, 
and  friend  in  matters  of  health.  We  have 
listened  to  wiser  advice  and  are  learning  that 
to  cure  a  disease  calls  for  far  different 
remedies  than  merely  to  stifle  its  symptoms. 
Not  many  ills  are  cured  from  bottles,  and  in 
nervous  exhaustion  particularly,  the  final  reli- 
ance is  on  rest,  food,  and  change. 

Getting  all  run  down  is  serious  business  and 
frequently  wins  too  little  sympathy  from  those 
who  are  entire  strangers  to  overtaxed  nerves. 
In  a  large  number  of  cases,  however,  and  per- 
haps to  some  extent  in  most,  the  physical  ex- 
haustion is  only  the  easily  noticed  foreground, 
of  which  the  equally  important  background 
which  must  be  taken  into  account  is  spiritual 
depletion.  Where  there  is  little  or  no  reserve 
of  spiritual  life  and  strength  one  is  much  more 
liable  to  get  run  down  in  spirits  and  conse- 
quently in  physical  stamina.  The  exertion 
which  a  healthy  man  does  not  notice  drains 
heavily  when  the  reserve  fund  is  low.  Many 
a  wise  physician  meets  cases  where  the  funda- 


190  FARES,  PLEASE! 

mental  need  is  not  a  few  teaspoonfuls  of  any 
prescription  so  much  as  it  is  a  new  grip  on 
life  and  a  new  outlook  that  will  come  only 
through  prayer  and  a  new  sense  of  God.  Many 
a  physician  not  so  wise  keeps  doctoring  in  the 
dark  for  ills  that  have  one  real  root  at  least  in 
spiritual  bankruptcy.  The  process  of  getting 
toned  up  often  depends  on  the  ability  to  re- 
cover a  conquering  and  confident  mood,  and  a 
lost  mood  is  one  of  the  hardest  things  on  earth 
to  find.  When  Carlyle  had  lost,  through  the 
carelessness  of  Mill's  servant,  his  only  manu- 
script of  the  French  Revolution,  his  wife  tried 
to  comfort  him  by  telling  him  he  could  write 
it  again.  "I  can  get  the  facts  again,"  he  said, 
^^but  how  shall  I  recover  the  glorious  mood  in 
which  it  was  struck  off  at  white  heat?" 

This  recovery  of  a  glorious  mood  is  only 
possible  by  bringing  ourselves  freshly  under 
the  conditions  which  first  caused  it.  And  for 
all  cases  of  lost  spirits  the  most  important 
element  of  restoration  is  the  quickening  at  the 
center  of  the  sense  and  presence  of  God.  "He 
restoreth  my  soul."  A  contractor  was  asked 
why  a  certain  group  of  houses  collapsed.  He 
replied  that  the  workmen  took  the  scaffolding 
down  before  they  put  the  wallpaper  up.    The 


GETTING  ALL  RUN  DOWN       191 

construction  of  some  lives  is  equally  thin.  To 
have  a  vigorous  and  real  spiritual  life  at  the 
center  is  our  greatest  need  for  every  point  on 
the  circumference. 

Another  frequent  cause  of  getting  run  down 
in  spirits  is  the  fact  that  when  our  time  is  all 
frittered  away  in  unimportant  pursuits  it 
easily  begins  to  drag.  Some  one  asked  an 
attendant  at  a  large  German  sanitarium  what 
the  guests  did  in  rainy  weather.  "O,"  he  an- 
swered, "they  just  annoy  themselves."  It 
describes  very  well  the  result  of  many  fussy 
activities  even  when  the  skies  are  clear.  They 
"annoy"  themselves,  and  the  annoyance,  sus- 
tained by  no  high  motives  and  bringing  no 
bracing  returns,  wears  on  the  nerves.  It  was 
a  vastly  different  answer  which  the  keeper  of 
the  lighthouse  on  Long  Island  gave  to  the 
question  as  to  whether  he  got  lonesome.  "Not 
since  I  saved  my  man,"  he  said  with  a  gleam 
in  his  eye.  The  joy  which  is  real  re-creation 
is  the  joy  of  service,  to  which  Miss  Sullivan, 
the  teacher  of  Helen  Keller,  has  given  such 
fine  expression  in  one  of  her  letters :  "My  heart 
is  singing  for  joy  this  morning.  The  light  of 
understanding  has  shown  on  my  little  pupiFs 
mind  and,  behold,  all  things  are  new !" 


192  FARES,  PLEASE! 

Every  one  who  lives  earnestly  must  expect 
fatigue.  We  must  use  whatever  means  we  can 
to  restore  the  wearing  down — rest,  fresh  air, 
and  change.  There  is  room  even  for  the  right 
"spring  tonic."  But  behind  all  these  things 
is  something  finer  and  surer.  "Even  the 
youths  shall  faint  and  be  weary,  and  the  young 
men  shall  utterly  fail;  but  they  that  wait 
upon  the  Lord  shall  renew  their  strength; 
they  shall  mount  up  with  wings  as  eagles ;  they 
shall  run,  and  not  be  weary ;  they  shall  walk, 
and  not  faint." 


XXXVII 
"SPLENDID  FAILUEES'^ 

Mr.  Harry  Graham  has  gone  to  a  strange 
and  unfrequented  field  for  material  for  a  very 
suggestive  book  which  he  calls  Splendid 
Failures.  Under  this  title  he  groups  a  number 
of  men  of  great  endowment  and  wonderful 
promise  who  never  achieved  any  results  at 
all  commensurate  with  their  talents  or  public 
expectation.  They  plucked  victory  by  the 
sleeve,  but  were  not  able  to  hold  her,  and  their 
moments  of  success  have  been  quite  forgotten 
because  of  their  ultimate  failure.  While  the 
author  does  not  add  the  role  of  moralist  to 
that  of  biographer,  some  of  his  studies  are  so 
extremely  instructive  that  he  who  runs  may 
read  their  teaching  in  the  simple  and  un- 
adorned recital.  The  stories  of  three  men  in 
particular  are  thought-provoking  to  a  degree, 
and  are  well  worthy  of  a  place  in  our  remem- 
brance. 

^'The  Cockney  RaphaeV  This  is  the  title 
given  to  Benjamin  Robert  Hay  don,  a  name  un- 
known to  modern  ears,  but  who,  on  his  advent 

193 


194  FARES,  PLEASE! 

in  London  in  the  early  part  of  the  nineteenth 
century,  was  greeted  as  one  of  the  greatest 
painters  of  centuries.  His  first  painting  was 
warmly  welcomed  by  the  Academy  and  sold 
for  one  hundred  guineas.  In  •rapid  succession 
he  produced  large  historical  paintings  which 
were  acclaimed  by  Hazlitt,  no  incompetent 
critic,  as  the  finest  works  of  art  since  the  days 
of  Titian.  Wordsworth  said  of  his  ^'Christ 
Entering  Jerusalem"  that  it  was  worth  wait- 
ing half  a  century  to  complete.  When  it  was 
exhibited  the  whole  of  Piccadilly  was  blocked 
by  the  carriages  of  those  who  wished  to  see  it. 
Leigh  Hunt  said  of  one  of  his  works  that  "it 
was  a  bit  of  embodied  lightning."  Walter 
Scott  paid  him  a  flattering  tribute:  "When 
all  the  figures  in  the  picture  get  up  and  walk 
away  I  want  the  little  girl  in  the  foreground." 
Haydon  was  the  possessor  of  abundant  and 
undoubted  talent  and  to  it  he  added  the  virtues 
of  unslackening  industry;  several  times  he 
nearly  blinded  himself  with  overwork. 

Even  in  the  world  of  art  to-day  the  name  of 
Haydon  means  nothing.  The  crossed  threads 
of  many  misfortunes  run  through  his  career, 
but  his  inclusion  in  a  list  of  "splendid 
failures"  is  due  most  of  all  to  two  causes  of 


"SPLENDID  FAILURES"  195 

many  a  failure,  splendid  and  otherwise — pride 
and  envy.  The  early  and  enthusiastic  recog- 
nition turned  Haydon's  pride,  already  great 
enough,  into  assurance  of  colossal  propor- 
tions. "What  Homer  dared,  I'll  dare,"  he 
cries.  "Genius  was  sent  into  the  world,  not 
to  obey  laws,  but  to  give  them."  "Give  me 
the  dome  of  Saint  PauFs,"  he  exclaimed  when 
told  that  his  canvases  were  too  large.  To  this 
blinding  pride  was  coupled  the  destructive 
force  of  envy.  In  long  series  of  bitter  letters 
he  heaped  satire  and  abuse  on  rivals  and 
critics,  and  lived  to  see  the  early  popularity 
turn  into  neglect  and  caricature  and  found 
himself  friendless  and  bankrupt.  The  fair 
promise  of  early  years  was  turned  into  a  tragic 
struggle  with  debt  and  disappointment,  to 
which  suicide  finally  put  an  end. 

"A  Shooting  Star.''  This  was  the  charac- 
terization given  by  Lord  Rosebery  to  Charles 
Townshend,  who  held  at  different  times  in  the 
latter  half  of  the  eighteenth  century  nearly 
every  post  in  the  British  Cabinet.  He  was 
Pitt's  only  rival  in  the  admiration  of  the 
House  of  Commons  and  was  confidently  ex- 
pected to  leave  as  immortal  a  name  in  history 
as  Pitt's.     Great  indeed  must  have  been  the 


196  FARES,  PLEASE! 

talents  which  could  have  won  from  Macaulay 
the  tribute,  "the  most  versatile  of  mankind." 
Hume  admitted  him  "the  cleverest  fellow  in 
England."  Burke  said,  "Never  in  this  or  in 
any  other  century  did  there  arise  a  man  of 
more  pointed  and  polished  wit,  or,  where  his 
passions  were  not  concerned,  of  more  refined, 
exquisite,  or  penetrating  judgment." 

Why  should  it  be  necessary  to  explain  at 
length  just  who  so  marvelous  a  prodigy  was? 
Surely,  here  is  equipment  enough  for  one  of  the 
"few,  the  immortal  names  that  are  not  born  to 
die"!  With  Townshend  it  was  nothing  more 
complex  than  an  entire  lack  of  fixed  principle 
which  might  bring  to  some  lasting  fruition 
his  prodigal  endowment.  His  only  principle 
was  the  career  open  to  talents.  He  would  have 
agreed  with  the  maxim  of  Talleyrand  that  un- 
selfish devotion  to  a  principle  or  a  party  im- 
periled a  man's  chances  of  success.  Let  the 
immortality  of  Pitt  and  the  nameless  abscurity 
of  Townshend  speak  as  to  the  truth  of  Talley- 
rand's cynicism!  Townshend  was  never  ear- 
nest, loyal  to  no  one,  and  though  he  was  hailed 
as  the  "greatest  man  of  his  age,"  lacking  com- 
mon truth  and  common  sincerity,  he  is  remem- 
bered only  by  a  few  historians  as  a  man  whose 


"SPLENDID  FAILUKES"  197 

disastrous  policy  helped  to  rend  the  British 
empire,  and  an  orator  of  whose  power  nothing 
remains  but  the  faint  reflection  of  a  rhetorical 
blaze. 

^^Little  Hartley/^  Hartley  Coleridge,  in- 
herited much  of  the  strange  genius  of  his 
father,  Samuel  Taylor  Coleridge.  He  was 
dubbed  "the  Philosopher"  by  Lamb  when  he 
was  three  years  old.  At  nine  he  had  written 
several  tragedies,  and  at  twelve  was  an  accom- 
plished Greek  scholar.  At  twenty  he  was 
appointed  a  Fellow  of  Oriel  College,  Oxford. 
Surely,  here  was  a  fine  sunrise!  Yet  before 
he  could  enter  on  his  Fellowship  those  habits 
of  dissipation  which  made  him  so  soon  a  splen- 
did failure  had  set  in,  and  all  the  rest  of  his 
life  was  "bound  in  shallows  and  in  miseries," 
of  a  lack  of  self-control  and  mental  concentra- 
tion. He  left  some  poetry,  highly  popular  in 
its  day,  among  which  are  some  of  the  finest 
lyrics  in  the  language — a  faint  gleam  of  what 
might  have  been.  He  died  at  the  age  of  forty- 
seven,  having  been  indulgently  cared  for  by 
Wordsworth  for  many  years.  His  biography 
might  be  well  summed  up  in  a  single  line  of 
his  own :  "And  still  I  am  a  child,  tho'  I  grow 
old." 


198  FAKES,  PLEASE! 

Splendid  Failures  are  not  good  company  as 
a  steady  thing.  They  are  depressing.  And  yet 
they  do  for  us  one  thing  which  is  well  worth 
having  done  at  any  price.  They  take  away 
from  some  very  familiar  words  all  sense  of 
the  hackneyed  and  give  them  a  startling  and 
fresh  application:  "Not  by  might  nor  by 
power,  but  by  my  Spirit,  saith  the  Lord." 


XXXVIII 

SWAN  SONGS 

In  that  finest  assertion  of  immortality  to 
be  found  outside  of  the  Scriptures,  the  death- 
less Phsedo  of  Plato,  Socrates  speaks  of  the 
tradition  of  the  swan  singing  before  it  dies. 
"For  they,  having  sung  all  their  lifelong,  do 
then  sing  more  than  ever  that  they  are  about 
to  go  away  to  the  God  whose  ministers  they 
are.  Men  slanderously  affirm  that  they  sing  a 
lament  at  the  last.  And  I  too,  believing  myself 
to  be  the  consecrated  servant  of  the  same  God 
and  fellow-servant  of  the  swans,  would  not  go 
out  of  life  less  merrily  than  they." 

So  the  great  pre-Christian  saint  refuses  to 
make  his  final  song  a  lament  but  voices  a 
paean  of  affirmation.  Following  such  a  noble 
tradition  some  of  the  great  seers  of  the  race 
have  left  among  their  last  utterances,  their 
swan  songs,  part  of  the  world's  most  priceless 
treasure.  The  records  of  these  hours  of 
supreme  insight  well  repay  our  study. 

One  of  the  most  imperishable  pictures  in  all 
literature  is  that  given  us  in  Augustine's  Con- 
fessions, where  he  and  his  mother,  Monica, 

199 


200  FARES,  PLEASE! 

just  before  her  death,  stand  hand  in  hand, 
gazing  out  over  the  blue  of  the  Mediterranean 
wondering  just  what  the  character  of  the 
eternal  life  will  be,  upon  which  she  is  so  soon 
to  enter.  We  cherish  the  picture  because  it 
expresses  so  perfectly  a  universal  hope,  love, 
and  wonder.  ^^With  what  body  do  they 
come?''  The  old  question  of  Paul's  day  evei' 
remains  in  human  hearts. 

Three  of  the  most  inspired  singers  of  our 
own  times  have  left  for  us  in  their  later  songs 
three  different  aspects  of  immortality  which 
appealed  most  strongly  to  them  as  the  end 
approached.  In  those  three  aspects  of  faith 
we  find  three  characteristics  of  eternal  life 
which  make  up  the  sum  of  all  we  need  to  know. 

1.  ^^To  meet  my  Pilot  face  to  face/^  This  is 
the  legacy  to  the  world  left  by  Alfred  Tenny- 
son, a  rational  faith  in  a  personal  God,  to 
whom  the  human  soul  has  an  eternal  value.  He 
has  fought  his  doubts  and  those  of  his  age  for 
more  than  half  a  century.  He  has  done  valiant 
service  for  the  faith.    He  is  now  at  peace. 

For  tho'  from  out  the  bourne  of  Time  and  Space 

The  flood  may  bear  me  far, 
I  hope  to  meet  my  Pilot  face  to  face 

When  I  have  crossed  the  Bar. 


SWAN  SONGS  201 

He  explained  the  Pilot  to  his  son  Hallam  as 
"that  Divine  and  Unseen  who  is  always  guid- 
ing us.''  The  Pilot  to  Tennyson  was  no  vague 
"stream  of  tendency  which  makes  for  right- 
eousness''; no  "Infinite  and  eternal  energy 
from  which  all  things  proceed."  "Mind,"  he 
enjoined  his  son  a  few  days  before  his  death, 
"you  put  ^Crossing  the  Bar'  at  the  end  of  all 
editions  of  my  poems."  It  was  his  communica- 
tion to  the  world  that  eternal  life  meant  facing 
the  living  Pilot. 

2.  "0  thou  soul  -of  my  souV  These  are  the 
words  of  one  who  never  turned  his  back  but 
marched  breast  forward,  Robert  Browning. 
They  were  written  in  his  last  years  when  the 
death  of  his  wife  was  still,  as  it  always  re- 
mained, an  unhealed  hurt.  His  militant  faith 
in  immortality  includes  a  personal  God  as 
surely  as  that  of  Tennyson,  but  his  fresh  sor- 
row leads  him  to  think  of  death  mainly  as  the 
reunion  of  a  deathless  human  love : 

For  sudden  the  worst  turns  the  best  to  the  brave. 

The  black  moment's  at  end, 
And  the  elements'  rage,  the  fiend-voices  that  rave, 

Shall  dwindle,  shall  blend. 
Shall  change,  shall  become,  first  a  peace  out  of  pain, 

Then  a  light,  then  thy  breast, 
O  thou  soul  of  my  soul,  I  shall  clasp  thee  again, 

And  with  God  be  at  rest 


202  FARES,  PLEASE! 

Had  Robert  Browning  never  written  a  word 
of  poetry,  he  would  have  left  the  world  im- 
measurably in  his  debt  by  imparting  what  was 
almost  a  new  saeredness  to  marriage.  His 
fine  and  pure  chivalry  lifted  human  love  into 
divinity.  His  faith  in  the  eternal  reunion  of 
souls  knit  together  on  earth,  as  expressed  in 
"Prospice,"  is  a  permanent  part  of  the  world's 
hope. 

3.  ^^So  the  right  word  be  said/^  This  is  the 
voice  of  our  own  Whittier  in  one  of  his  last 
songs,  voicing  an  aspect  of  immortality  some- 
times forgotten.  He  does  not  forget  the  earth 
he  is  to  leave,  but  takes  his  "freehold  of 
thanksgiving"  in  the  faith  that  the  strivings 
of  his  life  here  will  contribute  to  the  onward 
march  of  his  brothers  after  he  is  gone. 

others  shall  sing  the  song, 
Others  shall  right  the  wrong, 
Finish  what  I  begin 
And  all  I  fail  of  win. 

What  matters,  I  or  they 
Mine  or  another's  day. 
So  the  right  word  be  said 
And  life  the  sweeter  made? 

Immortality  of  influence  on  earth  will  not  of 
itself  satisfy  our  eternal  longing^  but  it  is  a 


SWAN  SONGS  203 

vital  part  of  the  deepest  hope  of  every  true 
soul.  Being  dead,  to  yet  speak,  and  be  a  bless- 
ing to  to-morrow  as  well  as  to  to-day  is  a 
part  of  the  power  of  an  endless  life. 

How  much  better  these  assured  aspects  of 
immortality  than  the  idle  speculations  with 
which  the  curious  concern  themselves,  with 
their  pre-  and  post-millenniums,  their  fan- 
tastic dates,  their  exact  chartings  of  the 
streets  of  the  New  Jerusalem !  For  the  glori- 
ous faith  expressed  in  these  supreme  hours 
is  among  the  things  revealed  which  belong  to 
us  and  to  our  children  forever.  The  assur- 
ance of  God,  the  permanence  of  personality, 
the  onward  sweep  of  the  Kingdom  on  earth — 
these  things  do  not  minister  to  a  restless  curi- 
osity ;  they  are  the  sure  girding  of  great  souls 
in  the  thickest  of  the  fight. 


THIS  BOOK  IS  DUE  ON  THE  LAST  DATE 
STAMPED  BELOW 

AN    INITIAL    FINE    OF     25     CENTS 

OVERDUE. 


OUT  i4ip3;|yLF 

JAN  14  1945    1     DEC  3     ^^5^ 

llDec'SSFF 
NOV  2  7 1953  LU.         l^^RU^^^^ 


REC'D  LD 

OCT  1    1956 


:T  1 1 1975  0  0 


LD  21-50m-8,-32 


(h 


YB  225 


